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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Untermeyer, Louis
(1885-1977) US author, poet, critic and prolific anthologist. He is of genre interest for his Parody volume Heavens (coll 1922), whose framing device is an Afterlife fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] in which the unnamed protagonist is offered a choice of 976 heavens including a number of "Literary Realms" themed for particular authors. Of the five actually depicted, ...
Sector General [series]
James White's long-running Series of Sector General stories, centred on the vast, multispecies Space Habitat whose full name is Sector Twelve General Hospital, are popular and likeable examples of Medicine-based sf. The sequence began with Hospital Station (stories November 1957-June 1960 New Worlds; coll of linked stories ...
Wallis, George C
(1871-1956) UK printer (before World War One), cinema manager and author who began writing sf and historical and adventure fiction in 1895 for the penny weekly adult magazines, the first of these apparently being a serial, "Behind the Barrier: A Story of Mystery and Peril in the Antarctic Regions" in Pearson's Storyteller for 12 October 1895/concluding issue not known; around the turn of the century, he was writing for Slick journals, but around 1903 he began ...
Chu, Wesley
(? - ) Taiwan-born actor and author, in US from an early age, whose Tao sequence, comprising The Lives of Tao (2013), The Deaths of Tao (2014) and The Rebirths of Tao (2015), combines Technothriller riffs with a knowledgeable rendering of a traditional sf topos: Forerunner Alien beings called the Quasing who ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...