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Friday 17 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 ...
Anders, Agnetha
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond her authorship of the Pleasurehouse sequence of erotic sf novels, set in a class-ridden Near Future Britain, and comprising Pleasurehouse 13 (1991) and The Last Days of the Pleasurehouse (1992). [JC]
Science Fiction Stories
US Pulp and subsequent Digest magazine which ran in two separate series and under several variant titles. Published by Blue Ribbon Magazines Inc (March-December 1939), Double Action Magazines Inc (March 1940-January 1941) and thereafter by Columbia Publications, New York; first series edited by Charles D Hornig (March 1939-September 1941) and the second series, 1953 to May 1960, was edited by Robert A W ...
Guthridge, George
(1948- ) US teacher and author who has also used the byline George Florance-Guthridge; he began to publish work of genre interest with "Dolls' Demise" in Analog for July 1976, with many further short stories following in F&SF and other venues. His first novel, Death Mask of Pancho Villa (1987) with Carol Gaskin, is a contribution to the Bantam Books Time Machine ...
Piekara, Jacek
(1965- ) Polish author of Fantastika, best known for dark fantasy but who has published a number of works of sf interest. He debuted with two genre stories for Polish magazines: "Wszystkie twarze szatana" ["All the Faces of Satan"] (August 1983 Fantastyka), a bleak, theologically inflected dark fantasy of fragmented Identity and metaphysical pursuit, and ...
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 ...