SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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: David Cowhig
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 ...
Panting, J Harwood
(1854-1924) UK author, most known for school stories for boys; in True All Through (1909), an sf novel also written for boys, can be found flying machines with wings that flap, and a proposed trip to Mars. [JC]
Rockets
The Chinese were using skyrockets as fireworks in the eleventh century, and adapted them as Weapons of War in the thirteenth. Europeans borrowed the idea, but rocket-missiles were abandoned as muskets and rifles became more efficient. According to Willy Ley in Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere (1944), a fifteenth-century Chinese legend tells of one Wan-Hoo, who attached rockets to ...
Marriott Watson, H B
(1863-1921) Australian-born editor and author, in New Zealand 1873-1885, afterwards in the UK; the son of Henry Crocker Marriott Watson. His family surname was simply Watson, but both he and his father used the fuller name in honour of the distinguished Marriott family, with whom a relationship was claimed. Although some of his stories, assembled conveniently in The Devil of the Marsh; and Other Stories (coll 2004) edited by James ...
Darnton, John
(1941- ) US journalist and author, during whose career with the New York Times from 1966 until his retirement in 2005 he earned several prizes for his foreign affairs reporting, including a 1982 Pulitzer Prize. His first three novels are sf; in Neanderthal (1996), a Lost Race of Telepathic Neanderthals, bifurcated into peaceful and warlike segments, is discovered in far Tajikistan, deep in ...
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 ...