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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.
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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 ...
Wiltshire, David
(1935- ) UK author of several novels for Robert Hale Limited including three Genre SF tales under his own name, beginning with The Homosaur (1978), and one as by John Bedford, The Titron Madness (1984). A BBC Television serial adaptation of his Horror in SF tale Child of Vodyanoi (1978; vt ...
Alley Oop
US Comic strip, created and drawn by V T Hamlin from 5 December 1932 for Bonnet-Brown, a small firm which soon collapsed, then from 1933 for the NEA syndicate; Hamlin retired from the daily strip in 1968 and from the Sunday strip in 1973, when it was taken over by his assistant Dave Graue (1926-2001). Drawn in a style more comically exaggerated than usual in adventure strips, though with clear affection, Oop is a tough and likeable ...
Wettenhovi-Aspa, Sigurd
(1870-1946) Finnish nationalist philosopher, painter and author, born Sigurd Wetterhoff-Asp; as early as 1910 he had begun to advocate the philological argument that all Indo-European languages have a common Finnish origin via Egypt, which was founded by Finns (see Linguistics); he was almost certainly the first, and perhaps the only, writer to suggest this. Wettenhovi-Aspa is of sf interest for an English-language novel, The Diamondking of Sahara ...
Satifka, Erica L
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Automatic" in Clarkesworld for January 2007, set like much of her short work in a Dystopian urban Near Future populated by outlier figures, some of them modified humans, some of them artefacts. How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters (coll 2021) generously represents this ...
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 ...