SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 10 November 2025
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 4 November 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Polygon
Russian animated short film (1977). Original title Poligon; vt Proving Ground; vt Firing Range. Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Anatoly Petrov. Written by Sever Gansovsky. Voice cast includes Alexander Beliavsky, Anatoly Kuznetsov, S Martynov, Oleg Mokshantsev and Vsevolod Yakut. Ten minutes. Colour. / Polygon is based on Gansovsky's short story "Poligon" (1966 Vokrug sveta #9; trans Matthew J O'Connell as "The Proving ...
Saxton, Josephine
(1935-2023) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Wall" in Science Fantasy #78 for November 1965, and whose first three novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends [sic] (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf Fabulations. ...
Zeh, Juli
(1974- ) German author whose fiction typically transgresses the "realistic" modes it harnesses. Of sf interest are Schilf (2007; trans Christine Lo as Dark Matter 2010; vt Free Fall), a noir thriller whose investigative deconstruction of a world where outcomes can be traced in advance is shaped by metafictional discussions between two physicists, one of whom may be just ahead of the cutting edge of ...
Bennett, Gary L
(1940- ) US physicist and author, author of at least two technical papers in collaboration with Robert L Forward, and of many pieces attacking American fundamentalism in its attempts to dismantle Evolutionary science; his sf novel, The Star Sailors (1980), deals with the conflict between a peaceful galactic civilization which is threatened by another, divisive galactic culture. ...
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 ...