SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 20 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Wilson, Peter Lamborn
(1945-2022) US anarchist author and poet who also wrote as by Hakim or (for political essays) Hakim Bey. He was controversial for occasional defences of paedophilia; his first novel of genre interest, Crowstone (1983) as by Hakim, is described on the cover as "A sword and sorcery boy-love tale" (see Sword and Sorcery). As Wilson he wrote some short sf for Interzone, ...
Warhoon
US Fanzine (1952-1985), edited from New York and Puerto Rico by Richard Bergeron. From undistinguished early issues, Warhoon became a large, attractive, duplicated fanzine containing careful and literate articles on sf and Fandom. John Baxter, James Blish and Robert A W Lowndes were among the regular sf columnists, and Terry ...
Corpsicle
One of the wittier items of sf Terminology, coined by Frederik Pohl as "corpse-sicle" in his contribution to the Cryonics symposium – also including Robert C W Ettinger – "Immortality Through Freezing" (August 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow), and contracted to "corpsicle" in Pohl's novel ...
Green, Evie
Pseudonym of UK author Emily Barr (1971- ) who under her own name has written several travel books, twelve nonfantastic novels, and at least three nonfantastic young adult tales. We Hear Voices (2020) as by Green, set in the Near Future after a coronavirus-like Pandemic (see also Disaster) has savaged the planet, focuses on a young boy under the influence of an ...
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 ...