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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Majestic
Videogame (2001). Electronic Arts. Designed by Neil Young. Platforms: Win. / Majestic was one of the first Alternate Reality Games, and to date the only one to be launched through conventional game distribution channels. Promoted as "The Game That Plays You", it was intended to blur the line between fiction and reality by intruding into players' daily lives, an idea apparently inspired by the film ...
Singh, Vandana
(1962- ) Indian academic and author with a PhD in theoretical physics, currently Professor of physics and environment in the Department of Environment, Society and Sustainability at Framingham State University, Massachusetts. She began to publish work of genre interest with "The Room on the Roof" in Polyphony (anth 2002) edited by Jay Lake and Deborah Layne, which was followed up by such ambitious work as "Delhi" (in ...
Masaki Gorō
(1957- ) Japanese author who won the 1987 Hayakawa SF Contest for new writers competition with his debut story collection Evil Eyes (coll 1988). This and his subsequent work largely reflect a Cyberpunk sensibility, particularly the Seiun Award-winning Venus City (1992), whose female office-worker protagonist habitually enters ...
McArthur, Maxine
(1962- ) Australian author who began publishing sf with the first volume of her Commander Halley sequence, Time Future (1999), which won the 1999 George Turner Award. It is an effective contribution to the growing array of sf novels in which the ambivalent history of colonialism on Earth is not transferred into narratives of Colonization of Other Worlds – a swerve typical of sf written from 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 ...