SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Yamano Kōichi
(1939-2017) Japanese author, editor and scenarist who became the country's leading proponent of the New Wave in sf, counter to prevailing trends in the field that continued to favour a model of fiction aping that of the Golden Age of SF in the United States. After a peripatetic youth and a flirtation with screenwriting, Yamano's professional sf debut was "X Densha de Ikō" ["Take the X Train"] (July ...
Garth, Will
A House Name used in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories and Captain Future 1937-1941 by Otto Binder, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Mort Weisinger and possibly others. The film novelization of ...
Bunch, Chris
(1943-2005) US screenwriter and author, in the latter capacity almost exclusively of series; his first two series – the Sten sequence of Military SF adventures beginning with Sten (1982) and ending with Empire's End (1993), and the Anteros fantasy sequence – were both written with Allan Cole. The first of these at least is thought mainly to express Cole's way with things, ...
Orwell, George
Pseudonym of Indian-born UK author Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), briefly but intensely in the early 1940s the partner of Inez Holden; much of his best work was contained in his impassioned journalism and essays, assembled in the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (each coll 1968). His fiction and extended social criticism, as in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), also demonstrates his ...
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 ...