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
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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 ...
Tucker, Mike
(? - ) UK special effects designer and author, active in the former capacity from around 1980, much of his work being for the BBC, including special effects for Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. He is of sf interest for various novels set in the Doctor Who universe, beginning with contributions to the Doctor Who Past Doctors subseries beginning with Doctor Who: Illegal Alien ...
Cook, Kenneth
(1929-1987) Australian author of Play Little Victims (1978 chap), a Satire depicting a world inherited by rational Mice after 2000, who attempt to control mouse Overpopulation by literally applying texts left by an extinct humanity, on the apprehension that all human activities – including War, famine, genocide and the automobile – were introduced in order to ...
Davis, Richard
(1945-2005) UK author, columnist, and editor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked as a story editor on two BBC Television series – Out of the Unknown (1965-1971) and the short-lived Late Night Horror – and was a columnist and film reviewer for Films & Filming. As a short story writer he wrote mostly in the horror genre, starting with "Guy Fawkes Night" in ...
Serpentarius
US downloadable Online Magazine published by Nancy Dix, Sidney, Nebraska. It was intended as a quarterly magazine paying up to professional rates, but the website was regularly hacked and the magazine closed down after one issue, January/March 2008. That issue is still available at the website below. This was really only a trial issue with little chance to show its full potential. It carried fiction by Cat Rambo and Chet ...
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 ...