SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Ye Yonglie
(1940-2020) Chinese author and occasional film director, sometimes under the pen-names Ye Yang, Ye Ting, Xiao Yong or Jiu Yuan, whose output stretches to fifty volumes of material, of which twenty-four are listed as "works popularizing science". A graduate in chemistry from Beijing University, Ye published his first poem aged eleven, and his first book while still a student. Aged twenty, he became one of the lead authors in the best-selling periodical ...
Rossow, William B
(1947- ) US climatologist with NASA and author, with Marjorie Bradley Kellogg (whom see for details) of the Lear's Daughters sequence of sf novels, which have much to do with violent spasms of weather on an Alien planet visited by inept human Scientists and less inept human planet-developers: rival AI ...
Beyond the Time Barrier
US film (1960; vt The War of 1995). Miller-Consolidated Pictures, American International Pictures. Produced by Robert Clarke. Directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Written by Arthur C Pierce from his original story. Mutant make-up by Jack Pierce. Cast includes Stephen Bekassy, Robert Clarke, Don Flournoy (Mutant), Vladimir Sokoloff, Darlene Tompkins and Ariane Ulmer (credited as Arianne Arden). 75 minutes. ...
Hammond, Clement Milton
(1859-1903) US newspaper editor and author, whose "Then and Now: Anarchy in the Year 2085" (1884-1885 Liberty) as by "Josephine D'Aujourdhui", a book-length Utopia never published in book form, argues for a temperate anarchism. In The Doctor's Mistake: Or What Myrta Saw: An Experiment with a Life (1888) with Charles Howard Montague, a complexly melodramatic plot – at least one ...
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 ...