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Tuesday 21 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 20 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 around 200 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Warrick, Patricia S
(1925-2023) US academic, most of whose work has concentrated upon the themes explicated in the book version of her PhD thesis, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980), an impressively thorough study that concentrates on the work of Isaac Asimov, including an analysis of the Encyclopedia Galactica which serves as Hari Seldon's electronic bible in the Foundation series; her analysis is supplemented by ...
McElroy, Joseph
(1930- ) US author who has gained attention for a series of intellectually formidable novels, almost all of which may be described as epistemological studies of contemporary life, exceedingly ambitious attempts to emplace narrated human beings into fields of what might be called planetary knowing and unknowing, while at the same time introducing arguments that these systemic "metaphors" are in fact good Physics. The mazes he creates may seem ...
Dath, Dietmar
(1970- ) German editor and author, active from the mid-1990s (see Germany since 1990). Several of his earlier novels contain homages to sf, though sometimes remotely: Am Blinden Ufer ["On the Blind Side"] (2000) alludes within an apocalyptic frame to H P Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock; and Dirac (2006) is ...
Stratemeyer, Edward
(1862-1930) US dime-novel entrepreneur (see Dime-Novel SF), a mass producer of boys' books who reportedly wrote 160 solo works, beginning with "Walter Drumm's Heroism" (1889 Young American), along with Dime Novels for Street and Smith as by Horatio Alger (1832-1899) after his death, Jim Bowie and Nick Carter; until coming to some kind of rest – it becomes hard to work out what he ...
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 ...