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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Zegra, Jungle Empress
US Comic (1948-1949). Fox Publications. 5 issues, numbered #1-#5, but #1 titled Tegra, Jungle Empress. Artists include Vern Henkel and Jack Kamen. Script writers include Vern Henkel and John Lanier. 36 pages with 3-4 strips (1-3 featuring Zegra or Tegra) and a short text story each issue, plus short filler material. Tegra, Jungle Empress #1 was published in August 1948 and Zegra, Jungle Empress #2 in October ...
Chang Shi-Kuo
(1944- ) Chinese author and lecturer in computer science (see Computers), in Taiwan from circa 1949, in the USA from 1966 and a long-standing professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Chang was the founding editor of the academic journals Visual Languages & Computing and Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, co-editor of Distance Education Technologies, and effectively ...
Foon, Dennis
(1951- ) US-born playwright and author, in Canada from 1973, where he became well-known for his plays for older children; of sf interest is the Longlight Legacy sequence, comprising The Dirt Eaters (2003), Freewalker (2004) and The Keeper's Shadow (2007), a Young Adult family drama set in a Ruined Earth-like landscape (though this venue may be a ...
Kops, Bernard
(1926-2024) UK playwright, poet, screenwriter and author, whose first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (performed 1958; 1959 chap), remains the best-known of his many dramas. As with much of his work, supernatural elements – in this case the ghost of the protagonist's father – easefully interact with the 1950s "kitchen sink realism" he popularly embodied. Happy endings in dramas of working-class life in London may be difficult to attain; in ...
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 ...