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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 ...
Huntington, Charles
(? - ) US author, possibly a pseudonym, of the Space Probe 6 sequence of unremarkable Space Opera adventures comprising The Soul Stealers (1972) and Nightmare on Vega 3 (1972) [JC]
Kennedy, John
(1945-2009) US author, involved in American Fandom all his life, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Toward the Fullness of Fate" in Galaxy for July 1976. Later work was assembled in the two versions of Nova in a Bottle (coll 1992 chap; with differing contents, exp 2003 chap). It is a sign of the esteem in which he was held that the first version contained essays on Kennedy by Vance ...
Smith, Howard S
(? - ) Canadian author whose sf novel, Howard S Smith's I, Robot (2008), while its author explicitly disavows any connection with any other story or film with the familiar title, does clearly depend on most of them in the Technothriller story of a twenty-first century Robot detective bound by the three ...
Lost Worlds
This rubric covers Lost Races, lost Cities, lost lands and Islands: all the enclaves of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subgenre was obviously a successor to the Fantastic Voyages of the eighteenth century and earlier, but there are important distinctions to be drawn. The ...
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 ...