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Saturday 18 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 ...
Rogers, John Rankin
(1838-1901) US politician (Governor of Washington 1897-1901) and author of The Graftons; Or, Looking Forward: A Story of Pioneer Life (1893; vt Looking Forward: The Story of an American Farm 1898), a Utopia structured as a reflection upon Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). [JC]
Conde, Víctor
(1973- ) Pseudonym of author Alfredo Moreno Santana, one of the most prolific sf, fantasy, horror and Young Adult writers in Spain. He has published more than thirty novels, one collection and almost a hundred of short stories, plus half a dozen mainstream books, all this in just over twenty years. His contributions to Spanish and Latin American sf magazines and anthologies number about one hundred. / Conde ...
Abu Tenpū
Pseudonym of Shinichi Abu (1882-1928), a Japanese author of Military SF for the early Pulps, and an early fictional proponent of the likelihood of a Future War between Japan and the United States. Abu's first career was that of an officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy, commissioned as a second lieutenant shortly before the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Resigning his commission ...
Venus
Because Earth's inner neighbour in the Solar System presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. Nineteenth-century astronomers and early-twentieth-century sf writers generally imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the ...
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 ...