SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Daniels, Sarah
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Open House" in Ghostlight for Spring 2019. She is of sf interest for the Stranded sequence beginning with The Stranded (2022), which is set on a cruise ship that, quarantined for four decades after what seems to have been World War Three, has become a Ship of Fools featuring a grotesquely ...
Beckler, David
(1960- ) Ethiopian firefighter, entrepreneur and author, in UK from 1984, who is of sf interest for his Antonia Conti series of thrillers beginning with A Long Shadow (2022), set in a Dystopian Near Future London, where lives are constantly monitored by privatized surveillance networks; the journalist protagonist, investigating the growing number of cases of ...
Cormier, Robert
(1925-2000) US author, highly esteemed for his Young Adult novels, especially perhaps The Chocolate War (1974), which is not fantastic. Of sf interest are The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (1983), which depicts the experiences of a child being experimented upon in a hospital called only the Complex; and Fade (1988), a tale of inherited Invisibility hovers ...
Keep
Term used in this encyclopedia to cover various sf extrapolations of the walled, gated or segregated community; it is very roughly equivalent to the Edifice in fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The sf term. It is taken from Fury (May-July 1947 Astounding as by Lawrence O'Donnell; 1950; vt Destination Infinity 1956) by Henry ...
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 ...