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Tuesday 14 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 13 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 more than 180 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Engel, Leonard
(1916-1964) US journalist and author, with Emanuel S Piller, of one of the very first Cold War Future War novels, World Aflame: The Russian-American War of 1950 (1947), in which the USA's control of the air – and use of that preponderance in a nuclear first strike – proves insufficient to crush Russia, nor does a subsequent use of Poison gas ...
Bermuda Triangle
A loosely delineated region of the Caribbean (one definition locates the triangle's vertices in Bermuda, in Miami, Florida, and in San Juan, Puerto Rico), long associated in popular culture with supposedly weird and inexplicable happenings – especially maritime and airborne Disasters or disappearances. As a result the Bermuda Triangle has to some extent replaced the mythos of the Sargasso Sea as a natural locus for weird ...
Orbit
1. Seminal US Original-Anthology series edited by Damon Knight. Although Orbit was not the first such series, having been preceded by Star Science Fiction Stories in the USA and New Writings in SF in the UK, it was its extraordinary early success that precipitated the boom in such series in the early 1970s. It had a more ...
Twiford, William Richard
(? -? ) US author of one sf novel, Sown in the Darkness: A D 2000 (1941), which depicts the Near Future as a time of constant War and decline; the author's presumption (see Race in SF) that the white peoples of the world must arm themselves against a "rising tide of color" may have some part in the disappearance of his tale of dreadful warning, despite Twiford's ...
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 ...