SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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
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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 ...
DeFelice, Jim
(1956- ) Prolific US author in various fields including successful thrillers, who began to publish work of genre interest with contributions to the Spinechillers sequence of Horror tales for young readers, beginning with Blood Red Eightball (1996) and using the series' House Name M T Coffin. Of greater sf interest are the Dreamland ...
Fodor, Ronald V
(1944-2021) US professor of geology at North Carolina State University and author of much nonfiction [mostly for younger readers and not listed below] as well as a Near Future tale of averted Disaster, Impact! (1979) with G J Taylor, in which a meteor threatens Earth. [JC/DRL]
Ah Lai
(1959- ) Poet, editor and author, who served from 1999 to 2006 as an editor of Kehuan Shijie ["SF World"], the best-selling genre magazine in the People's Republic of China. Born in the Ngawa and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Ah Lai is that rarest of Chinese authors: a member of China's Tibetan ethnic minority, a condition which shapes much of his work, including the much-garlanded Kong Shan ["Empty ...
Bergey, Earle K
(1901-1952) US illustrator, sometimes signing himself Earle Bergey, E K Bergey, or just Bergey, whose prodigious output for the Pulp magazines ranged across all genres, although it is for his sf work that he is best remembered today; towards the end of his life he began painting paperback covers as well, his most renowned being that for the 1948 Popular Library reprint of Anita Loos's (non-sf) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). He received his formal art ...
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 ...