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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Ikenberry, Kevin
(? - ) US author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Illegal" in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine for May 2012; much of his output has been Military SF, often couched in the form of Alternate Histories. The time-travelling (see Time Travel) protagonist of his first series, ...
Tine, Robert
(1954- ) US author who has also written as by Richard Harding, and who is probably best known for the Outrider Survivalist sequence under this name, beginning with The Outrider (1984) and ending with The Outrider #5: Built to Kill (1985). As usual for this subgenre, the Holocaust is vengefully enjoyed. Works under his own name include ...
Johnston, Bryan
(? - ) US screenwriter, producer and author; his sf novel Death Warrant (2022) unveils an homage to Robert Sheckley's The Tenth Victim (full version 1966) through its depiction of a young woman who agrees to be killed on a reality show (see Media Landscape; Television), but without knowing that a ...
Desmond, Shaw
(1877-1960) Irish author, poet, founder of the International Institute for Psychical Research in 1934, and author of many works on the afterlife and several Scientific Romances. Democracy (1919) predicts a Near Future revolution in the UK. The Dystopian Ragnarok (1926) envisages the destruction of civilization through a worldwide ...
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 ...