SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Suddain, M
(? - ) New Zealand journalist, playwright and author, in London from 2008, whose first novel, Theatre of the Gods [for subtitle see Checklist below] (2013), describes in a goofish gonzo idiom, complete with author's and editor's notes and obfuscations, its protagonist's Fantastic Voyage into other Dimensions, with a crew of children helping operate his ...
Woolf, Maud
(? - ) Scottish author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Stranding" in Metaphorosis Magazine for June 2021. In her first novel, the Near Future Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock (2024), it is possible to create entirely convincing Clones of oneself. The eponymous celebrity at the heart of the tale, after producing twelve, soon finds that the ...
Lee, Mary Soon
(1965- ) UK-born author and poet with an MA in mathematics from Cambridge University; currently in the US as a naturalized citizen. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Gift" in Strange Days magazine for Fall 1992. Her first book-length publication was the fantasy collection Winter Shadows and Other Tales (coll 2001), followed by the sf collection Ebb Tides and Other Tales (coll 2002); the latter includes work first ...
Speculative Fiction
Item of Terminology used by some writers and critics for a period after World War Two in place of Science Fiction. Its first known use is by the reviewer M F Egan in "Book-Talk" (October 1899 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine), which describes Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) as "speculative fiction". In the symposium published as ...
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 ...