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 ...
Omega Science Digest
Australian popular-science magazine, A4-size, publishing an average of two sf stories per issue; 37 bimonthly issues January/February 1981 to January/February 1987, edited by Philip Gore. The parent magazine was the US Science Digest, discontinued at around the same time. Though unexceptional as a science magazine, Omega Science Digest was, with a circulation around 35,000, for six years the most important publisher of Australian short sf, printing ...
Terrore Nello Spazio
Italian film (1965; vt Planet of the Vampires). Italian International, Castilla Cinematografica, American International Pictures (AIP). Directed by Mario Bava. Written by (English) Louis M Heyward, Ib Melchior; (Italian) Callisto Cosulich, Antonio Roman, Alberto Bevilacqua, Bava, Rafael J Salvia; based on a story by Melchior, based in turn on an Italian story by Renato Pestriniero. Cast includes ...
Meltzer, David
(1937-2016) US jazz guitarist, poet and author whose sf is almost entirely restricted to two sequences of erotic novels published by Essex House at the end of the 1960s, though he had published a very few stories earlier. The first sequence – the Agency series comprising The Agency (1968), The Agent (1968) and How Many Blocks in the Pile? (1969), all three assembled as The Agency Trilogy (omni ...
Lombard, Louis
(1861-1927) French-born composer, financier and author, in the US for long periods after 1876, where he became Director of the Utica Conservatory of Music; his Lost Race tale, The Vicious Virtuoso (1898), describes an advanced superscientific race in pre-pharaonic Egypt, a Utopia eventually destroyed by Religion. [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 ...