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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 ...
Khan
Short-lived UK band, named after the Star Trek villain. Its sole release was Space Shanty (1972), a suite of prog-rock songs embroidering a loose futuristic spacefaring concept, especially in the tracks "Space Shanty", "Stargazers" and "Hollow Stone (incl. Escape of the Space Pilots)". The music is characteristic prog: grandiose and ornate, alternating meditative moments with harder rock-orchestral thumpings. [AR]
Rothman, Tony
(1953- ) US physicist and author – son of Milton A Rothman – whose sf novel, The World Is Round (1978), though suffering from excessive length and a confusingly overcomplicated story, creates a Big-Planet venue (see Jack Vance) of some interest, in particular through his descriptions of the long year or Great Year (each day is 750 Earth days long) ...
Eisenstein, Phyllis
(1946-2020) US teacher – in later years increasingly active in this capacity – and author, whose first sf story was "The Trouble with the Past", written in collaboration with her husband, Alex Eisenstein, in New Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) edited by Robert Silverberg. She and her husband wrote other stories together, and he was influential also on work signed only by Eisenstein. Her first book, ...
Sanders, Scott Russell
(1945- ) US teacher and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Touch the Earth" for Edges (anth 1980) edited by Ursula K Le Guin; most of his work has been nonfiction, much of comprising nature studies set in America. His first novel, Terrarium (1985), is set in a Near Future America whose human population has retreated from the polluted world into domed ...
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 ...