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 ...
Thompson, Joyce
(1948- ) US author, often of works for children. Her first sf novel, The Blue Chair (1977), is set in an authoritarian Near Future where Immortality is restricted to those who have "earned" it; Conscience Place (1984) describes with quiet gravity an apparent Utopia hidden in the American West which is in fact populated by ...
Spotswood, Claire Myers
(1896-1983) Working name of US author Clairene Lenora Allen Myers Owens for her first novel, and only work of sf interest, The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman's Independence (1935), a Utopia told in allegorical language. The protagonist, Tellectina Femina Christian, abandons Smug Harbor in the Land of Err for the Forbidden Kingdom of Nithking, where the two personae signalled by her given names become separate but incomplete individuals. Only ...
Scherm, Rebecca
(circa 1985- ) US author whose first novel, Unbecoming (2015), explores in nonfantastic terms conundrums of Identity. Her second novel, A House Between Earth and the Moon (2022), which is Near Future sf set mainly in a Space Station, uses the intensive Zone of this under-development luxury resort, which could also be ...
Invaders from Mars
1. Film (1953). National Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Written by Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). Cast includes Helena Carter, Leif Erickson, Arthur Franz and Jimmy Hunt. 78 minutes (82 minutes in Europe). Colour. / A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of Things to Come (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's ...
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 ...