SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 April 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 14 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Watson, Ian
(1943-2026) UK teacher and author who lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for New Worlds in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for six years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic courses in sf in the UK; he became a full-time writer in 1976, publishing around 200 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Doroga k Zvezdam
Russian documentary film (1957; vt Road to the Stars). Leningrad Popular Science Film Studio. Directed by Pavel Klushantsev. Written by Boris Lyapunov and Vasili Solovyov. Cast includes Georgi Solovyov and other unidentified actors. 52 minutes. Colour. / This documentary begins with an extended look at the life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Solovyov), explaining how this visionary Scientist first devised ...
Land of the Giants
US tv series (1968-1970). An Irwin Allen Production for Twentieth Century Fox TV/ABC. Created by Irwin Allen, also executive producer. Writers included Bob and Esther Mitchell, Bob and Wanda Duncan, Richard Shapiro, Dan Ullman, William Welch. Directors included Harry Harris, Nathan Juran, Sobey Martin, Irwin Allen (1st episode only). Regular cast Gary Conway, Kurt Kasznar, Don Marshall, Heather Young, Don Matheson, Deanna Lund, Stefan Arngrim. Special ...
Darlton, Clark
Pseudonym of German author, translator and editor Walter Ernsting (1920-2005); he also wrote as F MacPatterson. In the 1950s he edited the German Utopia-Magazin (launched 1955), providing it with much original and translated material, usually as Clark Darlton (English sf writers found it easier to publish in German than did German writers; for some time Ernsting sold his stories as translations from the Clark Darlton originals); his first sf publication, Ufo am Nachthimmel ["UFO ...
Polish Sociological SF
A term coined in the 1980s in the wake of the proliferation and popularity of novels and short stories employing science-fictional tropes to allegorically depict and critically analyse either pathologies of the Polish communist state or totalitarianism in general. Several writers were involved in initiating the school, yet in the early 1980s, when most of Janusz A Zajdel's novels were published, he became its most prolific and popular writer, and as a result ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...