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 ...
Norman, John
Pseudonym used for his fiction by US author and philosophy teacher John Frederick Lange Jr (1931- ). His fiction mainly comprises a series of borderline-sf Planetary Romances set on Gor, a Counter-Earth sharing Earth's orbit but – because it is on the other side of the Sun – always invisible to us. This astrophysical impossibility is never argued in the texts, which might ...
GlitterShip
US semiprofessional podzine and associated quarterly magazine in Ebook form. Both are produced by Keffy R M Kehrli, who began the podzine in April 2015 in order to provide a further outlet for LGBTQ writers and as a focus for LGBTQ story-lines. / The first podcast, on 2 April 2015, was "How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps" from Scigentasy #4 (March 2014), which the author A Merc Rustad (also known as Marc Fenn Wolfmoor) said "was very autobiographical". ...
Maitz, Don
(1953- ) American illustrator, husband of artist and author Janny Wurts. Maitz actually began his career in sf art before graduating from the Paier School of Art in 1975, and he quickly began receiving regular assignments to paint book covers. From the start, he placed an emphasis on human figures, often in unusual positions with distinctive facial expressions; his cover for L Sprague de Camp's ...
Fukushima Masami
Pen-name of Masami Katō (1929-1976), a Japanese author, editor, and translator, whose abrasive personality and passionate advocacy led to his nickname as "the Demon of SF" [SF no Oni]. / As a translator, Fukushima was a prime mover in the arrival in Japan of Anglophone works from the Golden Age of SF, although his first publication was the non-genre Elephant Walk (1948; trans Masami Fukushima 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 ...