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 ...
Reeve, James Knapp
(1856-1933) US author of The Three Richard Whalens: A Story of Adventure (1897), a Lost Race tale, in which the third Whalen searches for the Caribbean Island where the first Whalen had made a mysterious discovery, two centuries earlier. [JC]
Linklater, Thomas H
(1849-? ) UK accountant, possible missionary and translator, whose version of Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune: Trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (1865) and Autour de la Lune: Seconde partie de: De la Terre à la Lune (1870) as From the Earth to the Moon Direct and Around the Moon (1877) remains among the very few Victorian translations of Verne worth keeping in print. In notes to his ...
Courtier, S H
Working name of Sidney Hobson Courtier (1904-1974), Australian school-teacher and author who principally wrote crime fiction, often with Australian bush settings and Aboriginal characters. His two sf thrillers for Robert Hale Limited are Into the Silence (1973), in which silence engulfs the Earth and the loss of spoken-word Communication brings chaos; and The Smiling Trip (1975), where a ...
Berry, Jedediah
(1977- ) US editor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Inheritance" in The Fairy Tale Review for 2007, and although his work is not generally thought of as sf, his first novel, The Manual of Detection (2009), imparts very considerable Equipoisal energy to the story of Charles Unwin, a detective whose investigations into his predecessor's apparent triumphs gradually unpack a deeply insecure world. ...
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 ...