SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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.
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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 ...
Brant, John Ira
(1872-1959) US inventor and author whose The New Regime: A. D. 2202 (1909) bases its vision of an international Utopia on the work of Edward Bellamy. Unusually, the "visitor" to this utopia is not a Sleeper Awakes figure but a contemporary man who has given himself Amnesia through Drug use, and must be reintroduced to his happy ...
Carter, Lauren
(1972- ) Canadian author whose first novel, the Near-Future Dystopian Swarm (2013), which is set at a time after fossil fuels have finally been depleted, follows its protagonist on a dangerous hegira into a ruined City for provender; her return to something like primordial wilderness, which in some narrative traditions might signal the ...
Ijäs, Jyrki
(1943-2010) Finnish film editor, translator and journalist, the first of whose (few) sf stories was "Koekaniini" ["Guinea Pig"] in 1968. One of the founders of Aikakone magazine (see Finland), he was also publisher and editor of Ikaros magazine, winner of the Finnish Kosmoskynä award in 1988, editor of Ensimmäinen yhteys ["First Contact"] (anth 1988), organizer (with others) of the first Finncon ...
Spufford, Francis
(1964- ) UK academic and author, relatively little of whose work is explicitly sf, though his nonfiction is deeply conversant with science-fictional modes of thought. Though it takes the form of a memoir, The Child That Books Built (2002) is in fact constructed around readings of various writers including Ursula K Le Guin, C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...