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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 ...
Yanagihara, Hanya
(1974- ) US journalist, editor and author best-known for the nonfantastic novel A Little Life (2015). Her first novel, The People in the Trees (2013), which is of sf interest, takes some elements from the life and career of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008), an eminent medical researcher who identified a cure for kuru, a deadly disease afflicting the South Fore people of New Guinea through their practice of funerary cannibalism, for which he ...
Publishing
The history of sf publishing is, in its widest sense, the History of SF itself; this entry, however, is concerned with a much more recent phenomenon, the emergence of Genre SF as an identifiable and distinctive category of publishing, and therefore concentrates on US firms. A great amount of sf was published in the UK 1900-1950, but, although some transplanted US genre sf appeared, until about 1950 most UK firms published sf ...
Kerman, Judith
(1945- ) US translator, publisher, academic, anthologist and poet (see Poetry), active from the 1970s; academic work is usually signed Judith B Kerman. Her poetry might be described as generally comprising personalized takes on tropes of the fantastic, with the teller of the poem, usually presented in a moderately fantasticated first person, governing the outcome. Her anthology Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic (anth 2000) ...
Samson
US Comic (1940-1941). Fox Publications, Inc. 6 issues. Artists include Alex Blum, Will Eisner and Bob Powell. Script writers include Toni Blum, Nathaniel Nitkin and Bob Powell. 68 pages, with 6-7 strips and a short text story per issue; 3-4 strips would feature Samson. / American, long-haired and blonde, Sam has inherited the great strength of his ancestor, the biblical Samson (see Religion; ...
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 ...