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 ...
Man from U.N.C.L.E., The [magazine]
Digest-size Magazine. Publisher: Leo Margulies Corporation. Editor: uncredited, but probably Cylvia Kleinman. 24 monthly issues, February 1966 to January 1968. / A Tie magazine spun off from the Television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (which see), this featured novella-length lead "novels" ...
Jefferson Starship
Also known as Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation and Starship. US psychedelic rock band, formed, as "Jefferson Airplane" in Los Angeles in 1965 by Marty Balin (1942-2018) and Paul Kantner, amongst others; later joined by Grace Slick (1939- ) whose songwriting skills and distinctive voice contributed a great deal to the commercial success of the band. The folk-rock and LSD-experimentalism of their early albums ...
Halpern, Marty
(? - ) US editor of several genre Anthologies, beginning with The Silver Gryphon (anth 2003) with Gary Turner. Further titles are Witpunk: Stories with Attitude (anth 2003) with Claude Lalumière, the Fermi Paradox-themed Is Anybody Out There? (anth 2010) with Nick Gevers, ...
Comets
Small, normally icy bodies of our solar system whose appearance during close approach to the Sun can be spectacular owing to heating and outgassing effects producing the coma (a visible local atmosphere surrounding the central nucleus) and long tail of dust and gas blown outward from the sun by the Solar Wind. Owing to this visibility and the regular return of short-period comets – whose home is in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit ...
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 ...