SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Japan
For a general note on this encyclopedia's handling of Japanese names, please see Editorial Practices: Chinese and Japanese Names. / Japan persists as a symbol of the alien and the unknowable, and popularly as a signifier of the future, particularly in the "Japanesque" vocabularies and settings of Cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and Bruce ...
Salvador, Tomás
(1921-1984) Spanish author of both mainstream work and sf. He published five sf novels, three collections and sixteen short stories. Most of these books were published in hardcover and had frequent reprints, showing that he was a popular writer. / As a teenager Salvador experienced the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side in Madrid although at the age of 20 he enlisted as a volunteer in the Blue Division, fighting for Nazi Germany on the Russian front for two years, where he was ...
Baggott, Julianna
(1969- ) US poet and author who has focused on dysfunctional family-romance narratives based on her own family – including a volume of poems, The Country of Mothers (coll 2001) and The Madam (2003), which is slightly fantasticated – and tales for teenage girls. Her Bodies sequence for children – comprising The Anybodies (2004), The Nobodies (2005) and The Somebodies (2006), all ...
Wilde, Oscar
(1854-1900) Irish journalist, playwright, poet and author, mostly in UK from 1874; noted for the witty epigrams which characterize much of his writing. Among his most enduring works are his social comedy plays, such as Lady Windermere's Fan (first performed 20 February 1892; 1893) and especially The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed 14 February 1895; 1898). Of primary genre interest is his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (July 1890 ...
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 ...