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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Apostolides, Alex
(1923-2005) US archaeologist, museum curator, journalist and author who began to publish sf with "Progress Report" (July 1953 If) and "Solution Delayed" (July 1953 Astounding), both written with Mark Clifton. He also collaborated with Clifton (whom see for details) on two early stories in the Bossy series and the first story only of Clifton's Ralph Kennedy sequence. Apostolides' one solo story is ...
Tuomainen, Antti
(1971- ) Finnish author (see Finland), largely in the crime mode, much of whose work contains a strong, sardonic sense of the absurdity of mapping a largely American genre onto a parochial Finnish setting, such as Palm Beach Finland (2017 trans David Hackston 2018), in which an entrepreneur turns to illegal methods to establish a seaside utopia. Unlike Reijö Mäki, with whom his work ...
Murray, Frieda A
(1948- ) US author of fantasy, almost always in collaboration with her husband Roland J Green, who began to publish work of genre interest with Throne of Sherran: The Book of Kantela: A Novel of High Fantasy (1985) with Green; further volumes in the presumably intended Throne of Sherran sequence did not appear. Green and Murray also contributed an Elric story to the Michael ...
Trew, Antony
(1906-1996) South African naval officer (mercantile and military) and author, in UK from the early 1960s; in World War Two he eventually commanded his own ship, primarily escorting convoys. His anti-apartheid opinions did not directly inform his fiction, most of it being historical dramas set at sea. Of sf interest are his first novel, Two Hours To Darkness (1962), a Near Future tale whose protagonist, a submarine captain who has gone mad, moves the ...
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 ...