SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 14 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Reilly, Matthew
(1974- ) Australian author, resident for some years in the USA, most of his work being thrillers in which secret histories of the world are treated in a manner Equipoisal between sf and the occult. His first novel, Contest (1996; rev 2003), is a Godgame tale: with others, the protagonist is Teleported into a maze-like Library by ...
Weird Adventures
US Comic (1952). Ziff-Davis. One issue, numbered #10. Artists include John Celardo and Phil Marini. 36 pages, with four long strips, a two-page text story and a one-page non-fiction strip. / In the 1950s the use of "weird" in a comic's title usually meant a focus on Horror; however, despite one story referring to black Magic, Weird Adventures is best considered an sf ...
Smith, Walter J
(1917-?2011) UK author of two sf novels, The Grand Voyage (1973) and Fourth Gear (1974), for Robert Hale Limited. More interestingly than some contributions to this publisher's sf series, the first tale involves a protagonist who joins the eponymous Voyage via Time Travel, and searches for earlier travellers who have mysteriously disappeared. / Smith apparently adopted the middle name James ...
Whaley, John Corey
(1984- ) US author of Young Adult fiction; his impressive first novel, Where Things Come Back (2011), is nonfantastic. But his second, Noggin (2014), depicts the Near Future surgical removal of its teenage protagonist's head (see Brain in a Box) after he has died of leukaemia, and Cryogenically stored for several ...
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 ...