SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 14 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 13 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 more than 180 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Patneaude, David
(1944- ) US author of Young Adult tales, whose Dark Starry Morning: Stories of This World and Beyond (coll 1996) contains both fantasy and sf; Epitaph Road (2010), set in the distant Near Future – sometime after a Pandemic in 2067 has eliminated almost all males (see Disaster) – interestingly explores ...
Healy, Dominic
(? -? ) Australian author, involved in trade union activities, in whose first sf tale, The Story of a Lost Planet; Or, the Wonderful Submarine (1919 chap), the trade-union survivor of the destruction of Earth recounts these events to sympathetic auditors on Canopus. The female protagonist of his second, A Voyage to Venus (1943), after escaping the human settlement on Venus, encounters a spoof culture of ...
Johns, Kenneth
Pseudonym used for collaborations between Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman on a long series of science-fact articles for New Worlds and Nebula Science Fiction 1955-1961. [JC]
Borgese, Elisabeth Mann
(1918-2002) German-born scholar and author, daughter of Thomas Mann (1875-1955), in US from the 1930s, in Canada from 1979; as a central figure in the gradual evolution of international ocean law in the twentieth century, she provided cultural prestige to the campaign to preserve the world's oceans, wrote books fervently arguing the case that humans must take collective responsibility for them, and founded the International Ocean Institute in 1972. She won the Order of Canada in 1980. Her sf is ...
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 ...