SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Watson, Ian
(1943- ) 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 more than 180 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo ...
Wonder Stories Quarterly
US letter-size Pulp magazine, Fall 1929 to Summer 1932, dropped to standard pulp-size Fall 1932 to Winter 1933, 14 issues, published by Hugo Gernsback's Stellar Publishing Corporation as a quarterly companion to Science Wonder Stories/Wonder Stories, the first three issues appearing as Science Wonder Quarterly. David Lasser was the managing editor. Wonder Stories Quarterly ...
Dahl, Roald
(1916-1990) Welsh-born author of Norwegian parents who spent periods of his life in the USA, but lived in the UK in his later years; married to the actress Patricia Neal 1953-1983; he also wrote as by Pegasus. Though his enormous success as an author of children's stories has tended to dominate perceptions of his career, he was in fact long best known for his eerie, exquisitely crafted, somewhat poisonous adult tales, many of them fantasies, though the first of his collections, ...
Money
Love of money, being the root of all evil, has always played a leading part in literature, and sf is no exception: few plots could move without it. Precisely because it is so basic, however, speculative thought has rarely focused on it; it is one of those things that is habitually taken for granted. Money may change its form, and the dollar may be replaced by the Credit, but its centrality in human affairs is inviolable. / The commonest of all wish-fulfilment ...
McLaren, Jack
(1884-1954) Australian author, in UK in later life, prolific in various genres, specializing in adventure tales, some of them exotic. Of direct sf interest is The Devil of the Depths: A Strange Story of the South Seas (1935), whose protagonist encounters a number of challenges Under the Sea and on a mysterious South Pacific Island, including Monsters, sentient flora, and the ruins of a ...
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 ...