SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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
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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 ...
Garner, Alan
(1934- ) UK author whose early work was primarily for children; he has lived all his life near Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the setting for nearly all his fiction. Garner is widely thought one of the finest, though most difficult, children's writers of his generation; he ceased publishing for younger audiences after about 1980; after a long hiatus, he published two adult novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), each of them ...
Hagedorn, Hermann
(1882-1964) US biographer and poet, active from around 1915, who is of sf interest for The Bomb That Fell on America (1946 chap), a poem (see Poetry) constructed as a Prediction of the new world created in the course of the "Trinity" project at Los Alamos: the new bomb may bring about the End of the World: "God have mercy on America!" But the Voice of God is unrelenting: "'The world is ...
Willard, Tom
(? - ) US author of Military SF adventures: the Strike Fighters sequence, beginning with Strike Fighters (1990) and ending with Strike Fighters #7: Blood River (1991), which slides occasionally into Technothriller country; and the Afrikorps sequence as by Bill Dolan, beginning with Afrikorps (1991) and ending with Cobra Curse ...
Nichol, Nyah
(circa 2004- ) Canadian author whose Young Adult Tempus Trilogy sequence beginning with Broken Shards of Time (2020) follows the trajectory, via Time Travel, of its bereaved young protagonist, who finds in the future that she must confront an inimical version of herself, and come to maturity through this encounter. She is helped by her companions to ...
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 ...