SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Shepard, Jim
(1956- ) US academic and author, active from the 1990s. Some of the short stories assembled in his third collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (coll 2007), are of sf interest. Nosferatu (1997; vt Nosferatu in Love 1998), though nonfantastic, conceives of F W Murnau (1888-1931) as being intimately haunted by the protagonist of his most famous film, Nosferatu (1922). / Shepard is of specific sf interest for his ...
Wilson, Grosvenor
(1866-1948) US poet and author in whose Future History, The Monarch of Millions, or The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (1900), a 1950s America is strictly organized according to wealth, with the Emperor richest of all; the sciences have advanced remarkably but the people remain potentially restive, and young Demos from Alaska is able to topple the old plutocracy. Unfortunately – despite this cosmetic democratization – the ...
KULT: The Temple of Flying Saucers
Videogame (1989; vt Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess in the US). ERE Informatique. Designed by "Arbeit von Spacekraft" (Johan Robson). Platforms: Amiga, AtariST, DOS. / In the future of The Temple of Flying Saucers, humanity has split into three distinct subspecies after a (presumably nuclear) apocalypse: the Psionically gifted Tuners, the physically mutated Protozorqs and the unaltered Normals. The player ...
Laurence, John
Working name of UK mathematician and author John Laurence Pritchard (1885-1968), in active service during World War One, who published some nonfiction books on aeronautics under his full name, and several detective novels as John Laurence. Of these, Murder in the Stratosphere (1938) is of some sf interest in that the aeroplane technology involved requires the use of Inventions not then made. He edited the journal of ...
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 ...