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 ...
Walker, Grace
(? - ) UK video producer and author whose first novel, The Merge (2025), evokes the last years of the Golden Age of SF in its premise that the consciousnesses of two humans might share one body in order to save space (see Overpopulation). But the crisis of Climate Change afflicting this Near Future ...
Curtis, Philip
(1920-2012) UK teacher and author who is best known for the Mr Browser sequence of Young Adult sf novels, beginning with Mr Browser and the Brain Sharpeners (1979; vt Invasion of the Brain Sharpeners 1981), which comically, though sometimes pedantically, engage teachers and others with various challenges, some of them instigated by Aliens. The eponymous villains of ...
Mertz, Joshua
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Cat Got Your Tongue" in Aboriginal for Winter 1997, and whose first novel, Machine Dreams (2000) – not to be confused with the nonfantastic Machine Dreams (1984) by Jayne Anne Phillips (1952- ) – a Near Future tale set in megalopolitan San Frangeles and featuring ...
Aldrin, Buzz
Working name of US fighter pilot (in Korea), astronaut with a research degree in orbital mechanics, rocket design entrepreneur and author Edwin Eugene Aldrin (1930- ), whose first space flight was in Gemini XII in 1966, and whose most famous extraterrestrial moment was the Moon Walk in 1969 in which Neil Armstrong took the first step. His first sf novel is Encounter with Tiber (1996) with John Barnes. Told by an historian ...
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 ...