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Tuesday 21 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 ...
Watson, Angus
(1972- ) UK author who initially wrote fantasy, primarily the Age of Iron sequence beginning with Age of Iron (2014). He is of some sf interest for his second sequence, the West of East series beginning with You Die When You Die (2017), set in an Alternate World America a millennium ago, where Magic works, though a band of lost Vikings takes refuge. Towards the end of ...
Strom, Pauline Anna
(1946-2020) US electronic musician, Reiki master and spiritual healer who also recorded as Trans-Millenia Consort. In the 1980s she created several mostly self-released records, including Trans-Millenia Consort (1982), Plot Zero (1983) and Spectre (1984), of gentle, rather beautiful instrumental music that is more personal and unpredictable than most New Age recordings, and often moves into territories similar to German cosmic music of the 1970s. ...
Paton Walsh, Jill
(1937-2020) UK author, partner from the early 1970s of John Rowe Townsend; they were married from 2004 until his death in 2014. Much of her fiction was for Young Adult readers; she also wrote several nonfantastic detective novels [not listed below] including the Imogen Quy series set in a fictional University of Cambridge college, and four authorized Sequels by Another Hand ...
House of Frankenstein
1. Film (1944). See Frankenstein. / 2. US tv mini-series (1997; vt House of Frankenstein 1997). Universal Television Entertainment for NBC-TV. Produced by Michael R Joyce. Directed by Peter Werner. Written by J B White. Cast includes Peter Crombie, Adrian Pasdar, Teri Polo, CCH Pounder and Greg Wise. 168 minutes. Colour. / In late 1990s Los Angeles (see California), police detective ...
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 ...