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 ...
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 ...
McElhiney, Gaile Churchill
(1888-1978) US author of a Lost Race novel, Into the Dawn (1945), in which a pilot discovers a hidden Island in the South Pacific housing descendants of lost Lemuria who have here created, with the aid of advances in Technology, a spiritually elevated Utopia. [JC]
Radiohead
UK rock group from the Oxford area. Their early work is recognizable, if high quality, "indie" rock, haunted by and expressive of contemporary anomie and angst. But the band's third album OK Computer (1997) exaggerated this individual sense of despair into a coherent and powerful Dystopian vision. Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was ...
Dunstan, Frederick
(? - ) UK author of, Habitation One (1983), an extremist Ruined Earth vision of life in a Keep governed by totalitarians fanatically opposed to science and technology; after vivid depictions of cannibalism, necrophilia, and much Torture (particularly of women), a new dawn is seen to dawn. [JC]
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 ...