SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 20 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 ...
Burgess, Tony
(1959- ) Canadian performance artist (under the name Tony Blue) and author in whose first novel of sf interest, Pontypool Changes Everything (1998), a Meme-spread Basilisk destroys victims' ability to make sense through language: then they go mad. It was filmed as Pontypool (2008), and assembled with the more conspicuously surreal ...
On the Silver Globe
Polish film (1988; original title Na srebrnym globie). Written and directed by Andrzej Żuławski, based on the novel Na srebrnym globie. Rękopis z księżyca ["On the Silver Globe. A Manuscript from the Moon"] (1903) by Jerzy Żuławski. Cast includes Grazyna Dylag, Waldemar Kownacki, Andrzej Seweryn and Jerzy Trela. 166 minutes. Colour. / A film with a troubled history, ...
Bama, James
(1926-2022) US artist and illustrator, active from before World War Two, in which he served. Some of his work as an illustrator was for sf magazines, beginning with the cover of Out of This World Adventures for December 1950; his work for the Saturday Evening Post was nonfantastic. His first book cover, for the nonfantastic A Bullet for Billy the Kid (1950) ...
Clarke, Percy
(? -? ) An author active in the 1880s and 1890s, either UK or Australian; set in Australia like his other works, his sf novel, The Valley Council; or, Leaves from the Journal of Thomas Bateman of Canbelago Station N. S. W. (1891), combines intimate details of outback life with the portrayal of a Lost Race society of Englishmen who, 150 years earlier, have established a rule-bound but ultimately flexible ...
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 ...