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 20 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Pantell, Dora
(1915-1996) US teacher, technical writer and author of fiction for children, best known for her continuation of Ellen MacGregor's Miss Pickerell series of tales about Lavinia Pickerell, a highly adventurous New England spinster. Pantell wrote most her contributions as with MacGregor, who had left copious notes for continuations of the sequence, in which Pickerell applies her rigorous intellect to uncovering the scientific premises underlying ...
Tom Corbett: Space Cadet
US tv series (1950-1955). CBS TV, later ABC TV, and then NBC TV for season five. Produced by Mort Abrahams. Writers included Albert Aley, Alfred Bester, Joseph Greene, Jack Weinstock. Directors included George Gould, Ralph Ward. Cast includes Michael Harvey, Al Markim, Jan Merlin and Frankie Thomas. Five seasons. Three fifteen-minute episodes weekly for the first four seasons; weekly ...
Houser, Lionel
(1908-1949) US screenwriter, film producer and author of the medical fantasy Caress and Farewell (1934), in which a female surgeon attempts to create a custom lover whose short life will be utterly dedicated to her (see Medicine). [DRL]
Rouff, Marcel
(1877-1936) Swiss-born French author of a Future History, Voyage au monde à l'envers (1 October-15 November 1920 Mercure de France; 1923; trans Brian Stableford as Journey to the Inverted World 2011), whose aviator narrator, having disappeared from a Europe convulsed by World War One, finds himself in Australia two millennia hence, which 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 ...