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 ...
Whiteside, Thomas
(1918-1997) UK-born journalist and author, in USA most of his life; most of his work, like The Tunnel Under the Channel (1972), is nonfiction. Much of this is focused on Ecological issues, as in Defoliation: What Are Our Herbicides Doing to Us? (1970). He is of sf interest for the Near Future novel Alone Through the Dark Sea (1964), in which three narratives interweave, each based on isolation: ...
Vaughan, Richard
(? -? ) Author, believed to have been Canadian, who wrote only two known stories, the first being"The Woman from Space" (Spring 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly) in which Earth is under threat from an errant planet and which features an array of superscientific gadgetry. His far more ambitious second tale was seared into the memories of 1930s Magazine readers as among the best serials of ...
Thorne, Anthony
(1904-1973) UK playwright and author whose Thirteen O'Clock: A Play in Three Acts (1929) is set mostly in an unnamed "super City" in the moderately distant Near Future, where despite the efforts of its brave protagonist – who with the aid of his Invention of a powerful explosive blows up buildings as an act of protest – it proves impossible to destabilize rampant capitalism. The ...
Fry, Lena Jane
(? -? ) US author, the larger part of whose Other Worlds [for full title see Checklist] (coll 1905) describes a lightly fictionalized socialist Utopia set on the planet Herschel, named after the composer and astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822), who discovered Uranus; the volume also includes a short story, "The Planet Venus", in which the inhabitants of Venus view Earth through a telescope ...
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 ...