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Thursday 16 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 ...
Francis, Matthew
(1956- ) UK poet, editor and author whose sf novel, Whom (1989), is set in an America secretly governed by a vast Computer and ravaged by fundamentalist anxieties (see Religion); the tale itself includes Timeslip episodes, plus some mild-mannered Satire, and intimations of that Holocaust and rapture will soon ...
Castellucci, Cecil
(1969- ) US rock singer, comics writer and author, in Canada for several years from early adulthood; in her music career she works under the name Cecil Seaskull, being most active as a performer during the 1990s. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Lights, Camera, Action" in Magic in the Mirrorstone (anth 2008) edited by Steve Berman; her novels, all to date written for the Young Adult market, include some of sf ...
Bornstein, Kate
(1948- ) US performance artist, playwright and author whose Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure (1996) with Caitlin Sullivan is an sf tale whose two protagonists meet in a Near Future Cyberspace where in theory they can play sophisticatedly with their own and others' Gender identities (see Feminism; Sex; ...
Saville, Malcolm
(1901-1982) UK editor and author, mostly for younger readers from 1943 until his death, most of his work being grouped into various series, the best known of these being the Lone Pine sequence, centring on a group of young friends who, in the first instalment, Mystery at Witchend (1943), thwart some German spies. Nothing of his work is of sf interest except for one tale in that series, Saucers Over the Moor: A Lone Pine Story (1955), in which the gang ...
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 ...