SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Journey to the Beginning of Time, A
Czechoslovakian film (1955; original title Cesta do pravěku; vt Journey to Prehistory). Filmové Studio Gottwaldov. Directed by Karel Zeman. Written by J A Novotný and Karel Zeman. Cast comprises Vladimír Bejval, Petr Herrmann, Zdeněk Husták and Josef Lukáš. 93 minutes. Colour. / After a boy finds a fossil trilobite near a cave, his three teenaged friends take him to Prague's natural history museum to see the exhibits, ...
Saki
Pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), Burma-born UK author and journalist in England from infancy; noted for the acerbic wit and grace of his fiction, almost all of it in short forms. In the late 1890s he began writing contemporary political sketches, inspired and illustrated by F Carruthers Gould, for The Westminster Gazette as by Saki, the name of the "Minister of Wine" in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, publishing these ...
Caine, Peter
Pseudonym of US author Doug Hornig (1943- ), author of several crime thrillers under that name, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Game of Magical Death" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for March 1987. His one title as by Caine, Virus (1989), is a Near Future medical sf (see Medicine) thriller about a radical plot to infect the world ...
Hatch, Mary R P
(1848-1935) US author who also published as by Mabel Percy, including some mysteries set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire; her novel of sf interest, The Missing Man (first appeared 1892 Portland Maine Transcript; 1892), is a mystery tale whose solution depends on Telepathy. [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 ...