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 ...
Hornbostel, Lloyd
(1934-2007) US author whose first work of sf interest is An Act of God (1996), a Holocaust tale set in a different Near Future than the one commonly expected in the twenty-first century: here snow falls on the tropics, and Florida is made uninhabitable, all as a consequence of the dimming of the Sun. [JC]
Foster, George C
(1893-1975) UK author, in active service during World War One, who also published as by Seaforth; in his first novel, The Lost Garden (1930), Immortal survivors of Atlantis, which has sunk after a trans-Atlantic tunnel collapses, experience world history up to the present, finding little of significance to remark upon. In almost all his speculative fiction, conventional plots are ...
Wheeler, Paul
(1934-2025) Jamaican-born UK screenwriter and author in whose The Friendly Persuaders (1968) benign-seeming Aliens from the planet Tarax appear in London and, offering promises of universal peace and free love, are soon swept into governmental power by a surge of popular acclaim. Inevitably this low-key Invasion conceals a more sinister agenda; one man's dogged resistance leads to revelations and ...
Heuston, B F
(1859-1907) US author of a Utopia, The Rice Mills of Port Mystery (1892), set in the Near Future Pacific Rim on Puget Sound, where free trade signals the arrival of a better world. [JC]
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 ...