SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
SF in Translation
Speculative fiction is a global enterprise, and translation is the vehicle by which it becomes intelligible to readers around the world. This has been the case since Jules Verne began publishing in France, soon after which his texts were translated (often badly) into English for American and British consumption. Since then, the number of translated works of sf has risen and fallen based upon the interest (or lack thereof) of editors and anthologists in the ...
Day of the Triffids, The
1. BBC Radio dramatization (1957) of The Day of the Triffids (6 January-3 February 1951 Collier's Weekly; as "Revolt of the Triffids"; 1951; rev 1951; orig version vt Revolt of the Triffids 1952) by John Wyndham. / 2. Film (1963). Security Pictures/Allied Artists. Directed by Steve Sekely (uncredited), Freddie Francis. Written by ...
Bama, James
(1926-2022) US artist and illustrator, active from before World War Two, in which he served. Some of his work as an illustrator was for sf magazines, beginning with the cover of Out of This World Adventures for December 1950; his work for the Saturday Evening Post was nonfantastic. His first book cover, for the nonfantastic A Bullet for Billy the Kid (1950) ...
Malraux, André
(1901-1976) French statesman, adventurer and author whose La Voie royale (1930; trans Stuart Gilbert as The Royal Way 1935) conveys a slightly peripheral Lost World atmosphere as its spiritually ambitious protagonist travel further and further into a heart of darkness in Cambodia and Laos, searching for a mysterious lost guru. [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 ...