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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 ...
Gulliver
Lemuel Gulliver is the narrator of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships (1726; rev 1735) by Jonathan Swift, better known as Gulliver's Travels, the short-form title by which it immediately became known by its commentators and critics. It is one of the most widely recognized literary texts of the eighteenth century and has been a ...
Under the Sea
The world under the sea is an alien environment still in the process of being explored. John Wilkins, in Mathematicall Magick (1648), offered speculative designs for submarines and discussed the possibility of underwater colonization; already, in about 1620, Cornelius Van Drebbell (1572-1633) had successfully navigated a submarine rowing-boat in the Thames, and before the end of the century another would-be submariner had perished in Plymouth ...
Miller, Ruth
(? - ) US author of a Young Adult sf novel, The Thirty-First of April (1982), set in a Parallel World. [JC]
Purser-Hallard, Philip
(1971- ) UK author born Philip Hallard who began to publish work of genre interest with "First Person" (in Perfect Timing 2, anth 1999, edited by Julian Eales and Helen Fayle), and who became identified with the Doctor Who universe through the ambitious Of the City of the Saved ..., a Tie the Faction Paradox sequence, set at the Cosmological hot-spot ...
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 ...