SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 20 April 2026
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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 ...
Benelux
The Benelux consists of three nations: the Netherlands (Holland), Belgium and Luxembourg. The Dutch language is spoken in the Netherlands and in the northern part of Belgium, called Flanders. The French-speaking southern and eastern part of Belgium is called Wallonia. In the field of literature Flanders and the Netherlands are one domain, and the same can be said for Wallonia and France. Flemish (from Flanders) and Walloon (from Wallonia) authors are mostly published, respectively, in the ...
Hoobler, Thomas
(1942-2025) US editor and author, mostly of nonfiction for young audiences in collaboration with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, with at least 100 titles beginning in the 1970s. Of sf interest is the Hunters sequence comprising The Hunters (1978) with Burt Wetanson and The Treasure Hunters (1983) with Burt Wetanson, featuring a race of ...
Eakins, William
(1944- ) US civil servant who specialized in environmental health issues, and author of Key West, 2720 A.D. (1989), a novel set in Florida in a gay context (see Gender; Sex); this life is threatened. Eakins should not be confused with the short-fiction author William R Eakin (see Neverworlds). [JC]
Balsdon, Dacre
(1901-1977) academic, historian and author, who signed his nonfiction as J P V D Balsdon, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford 1927-1969; his sf novels are humorous Satires on contemporary mores, little allowance being made for technological, social or behavioural change. The most imaginative, Sell England? (1936), is a Dystopia set 1000 years hence in which the UK is inhabited solely by a decadent aristocracy, while the other ...
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 ...