SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Stebbing, William
(1831-1926) UK journalist, barrister, historian and author, much of whose work appeared in The Times (London) between 1868 and the end of the century in the former of leaders (or, in common modern parlance, editorials). Of his fiction, Probable Tales (coll 1899) is of some sf interest for its Satirical depictions of a number of imaginary civilizations, some of them Ruritanian, at least one evincing some ...
Barron, Neil
(1934-2010) US bibliographer and book editor, trained as a librarian, who received a Pilgrim Award in 1982 for his work; he has produced some of the liveliest and most readable scholarship in sf, notably in the five well-researched editions of Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction (1976; exp vt Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction: Second Edition 1981; further exp vt ...
Ross, Malcolm
(1895-1965) US author and reporter, the protagonist of whose Time in Reverse sf novel, The Man Who Lived Backward (1950), lives from 1940 to 1865, dying just after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which he is therefore unable to prevent. [JC]
Bow, James
(1972- ) Canadian author, initially of Young Adult fantasy, who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Stone of the Heart" with Erin Bow, in Missing Pieces (anth 2001) edited by Shaun Lyon and Mark Phippen. His first series, the Unwritten Books sequence beginning with The Unwritten Girl (2006), follows its young protagonists' lives in a Toronto where stories come ...
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 ...