SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Pendexter, Hugh
(1875-1940) US author, mainly of Westerns for boys, though his first book, Tiberius Smith: As Chronicled by his Right-Hand Man Billy Campbell (coll of linked stories 1907), assembles a series of tales about Smith, beginning with "A Corner in Jurisdiction" (17 June 1905 Saturday Evening Post). The stories recount his exorbitant adventures as a big game hunter, who utilizes spoof ...
Kinsella, John
(1963- ) Australian teacher, editor, poet and author, active from around 1980, who has also written as by John Heywood; much of his Poetry taxingly juxtaposes a deep-seated rendering of the world of his native Western Australia against visions of what has been done to it in recent centuries (see Climate Change; Ecology; ...
Florakis, Diamandis
(1935- ) Greek author who has written at least ten sf novels since his first, Epistotē sto mellon (1973; trans anon as Return to the Future: A Transcendental Novel 1981), which initiates his eleven-volume Eschatological Un-Reality/Existential Anarchy, a series whose individual volumes share a sharp Satirical take, a conceptual adventurousness reminiscent of the work of European sf writers like Yevgeny ...
Marshall, Helen
(1983- ) Canadian academic, author and poet, in UK from 2014, more recently in Australia; partner of Vince Haig (who writes as Malcolm Devlin) since 2015. She began to publish poetry around 2004, and published her first work of genre interest with "Skin" in Future Lovecraft (anth 2011) edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles. Most of her work – much of which has been ...
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 ...