SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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.
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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 ...
Lebbon, Tim
(1969- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Simon Says" in Psychotrope for March 1994, and who until recent years almost exclusively specialized in Affect Horror and fantasy, though from the first an instinct for worldbuilding has constantly threatened to widen this remit; from early in his career he has tended to set his tales in variously designated (or background) landscapes in the throes of apocalyptic decay, often referring to this ...
Owen, Maurice
(1925-2008) Australian wholesaling company manager, resident in New Zealand for many years, and author of an sf tale for Robert Hale Limited: The White Mantle (1967), in which radical Climate Change – a new ice age – is set off by an Asteroid. [JC]
Riou, Édouard
(1833-1900) French artist and illustrator, a student of Gustave Doré; he is best known for illustrating several early instalments of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires sequence, beginning with Five Weeks in a Balloon (1865). His style, with its emphasis on outdoor scenes featuring heavily foregrounded Monsters and other creatures, stands in some contrast to the more ...
2001: A Space Odyssey [comics]
1. US oversized tabloid-format perfect-bound Comics publication. Publisher: Marvel Comics. Editor, writer, and artist: Jack Kirby; inker, Frank Giacoia. One issue dated 1976. / This "treasury edition" comics adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was part of the deal which led to Jack Kirby's brief return to Marvel Comics in the mid-1970s. ...
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 ...