SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 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 ...
Subotnick, Morton
(1933- ) US electronic avant-garde composer, whose work has often formed the basis for interpretive dance. His instrumental album Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) was the first purely electronic release on Nonesuch records, and remains his most celebrated work: the restless, rather insectile rhythms and forays into atonal clanking add flavour to a suite of elegantly counterpointed synthesized tones that connect with contemporary excitement at the Apollo ...
Arnott, Jake
(1961- ) UK author and playwright whose first novel was The Long Firm (1999), set in the 1960s UK criminal underworld and adapted in 2004 as an award-winning BBC2 Television series. Of particular sf interest is his sixth novel The House of Rumour (2012), an exploration of cultism, occultism, disinformation and myth-making from World War Two to the end of the twentieth century. ...
Zajac, Gord
(? - ) Canadian screenwriter and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Second Skin" in Challenging Destiny for May 1997. In his gonzo Military SF novel, Major Kamage (2010), set two decades after an unspecified War, an unreconciled veteran of the conflict, and his disbanded cohort, must save the soft new world, which is at ...
Curtis, Jean-Louis
Pseudonym of French author Louis Lafitte (1917-1995), author of several untranslated works, none fantastic; his collection of five satirical sf stories, Un saint au néon (coll 1956; trans by Humphrey Hare as The Neon Halo: The Face of the Future 1958), very sharply depicts a Near-Future world whose centre cannot hold. The tone is vivacious, didactic, circumstantial; its wit is distanced in the récit fashion long ...
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 ...