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
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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 ...
Sinclair, Alison
(1959- ) UK-born medical doctor and author, permanently in Canada from 1979, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Assassin" in Back Brain Recluse for Summer 1991. She is of greatest sf interest for her first three novels. Though no specific mention is made of Homo sapiens, Legacies (1995) is tonally akin to sf novels, mostly of an earlier generation, which are set during or after the great ...
Kjelgaard, Jim
(1910-1959) US author, usually of adventure novels for children, most of them about animals or set in the natural world, of which Fire-Hunter (1951) is of interest as a competent example of Prehistoric SF; the protagonist of the tale responds to challenge with several culture-transformative Inventions. He wrote some stories, probably all horror, for Weird Tales, plus one collaboration ...
Bornefeld, William
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, Time and Light (1996) depicts a Dystopian post-holocaust society in which all visual arts are forbidden, and the population is required to ingest daily a pharmacopoeia of Drugs which combine the effects of Viagra and Prozac and more; the protagonist discovers a horde of forbidden photographs from the twentieth century, which stirs his mind and leads to ...
Ellis, Mark
(? - ) US publisher and author much of whose creative work – since beginning his career in the 1980s with storylines for Star Rangers and other Comics – has been tied closely to visual projects, including Graphic Novels such as H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness (1991-1992 H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness; 1993). He is ...
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 ...