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Wednesday 22 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 ...
East, Rebecca
Pseudonym of US author Rebecca Warner (1951- ), a psychology professor at the University of New Hampshire. Her first novel A.D. 62: Pompeii (2003), is a Time Travel tale whose protagonist – a twenty-first-century expert in the period – is sent on an exploratory mission to the first century Roman empire, but is stranded there, and to survive becomes a kind of Scheherezade, telling stories out of her centuries of ...
Manley, R M
(? -? ) US author of a Lost World novel, The Queen of Ecuador (1894), in which a red-headed Englishman discovers an Inca-based civilization in the Vale of Paucartambo, and weds a princess; back in the normal world, his daughter is threatened by a Mad Scientist doctor, but escapes. [JC]
Williams, Nick Boddie
(1906-1992) US newspaperman – he was with the Los Angeles Times 1931-1971, serving as its chief editor from 1958 – and author who contributed short Genre SF stories to various Slicks; he reported having published his first sf story pseudonymously in Weird Tales in the late 1920s, but could recall neither title nor pseudonym. The Atom Curtain (1956 dos) is set in a thoroughly ...
MacInnes, Helen
(1907-1985) Scottish author, in US from 1937 (naturalized 1952); married to the popular broadcaster and academic Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) from 1932 until his death; active from the early 1930s. She was best known for spy novels like Above Suspicion (1941), though she also wrote some well-received romances. The one oddity in her bibliography is Home Is the Hunter: A Comedy in Two Acts (performed 1964; 1964), the only play she wrote in a career of some forty-five ...
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 ...