SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 14 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 ...
Scarlet Street
US Letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine printed on middle-grade paper. Publisher: Jessie Lilley as Scarlet Street Inc. Editor: Richard Valley (1949-2007). 55 issues, July 1991 to June 2006. Publication schedule was irregular but approximately quarterly. / Starting life as a black and white offset Fanzine in 1991, Scarlet Street soon achieved Semiprozine status, gaining considerable ...
Slater, Philip
(1927-2013) US academic (who abandoned his career as a professor of sociology in 1971), actor, playwright and author who remains best known for such acute analyses of Western culture as The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) and Earthwalk (1974). His How I Saved the World (1985), about nuclear Disaster, reiterates in spoof-thriller guise the lessons urged in his nonfiction; en passant he mocks conspiracy theories, occult ...
Futrelle, Jacques
(1875-1912) US author and theatrical manager, on the editorial staff of the Boston American; he was one of four authors of sf (the others are John Jacob Astor, F D Millet and W T Stead) known to have gone down with the Titanic. The stories assembled in his Thinking Machine collections about the scientific detective Professor Augustus S F X Van Dusen ...
Hopen, Stuart
(1953- ) US healthcare lawyer and author of Comics from the 1970s, his titles including the single issue of Daemon Mask (1987) with Russ Martin, the short Graphic Novel Xyr: The Seekers of Valcin (graph 1988) and the single issue of what was intended as a seven-part miniseries, The Wandering Stars (1987) with Sam Kieth. This last storyline was instead developed into Hopen's first ...
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 ...