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Sunday 19 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.
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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 ...
Richards, Ross
(? - ) US (presumably) author of two Ties of some genre interest: Through the Dark Curtain (1965) as by Desmond Reid for the Guardians sequence about psychic investigators [for Occult Detectives see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; and The Slave Brain (1967) as by Peter ...
Williams, Liz
(1965- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Child of the Dead" in Interzone for September 1997, which was assembled with other early work as The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories (coll 2004); later stories were assembled as A Glass of Shadow (coll 2011). Her first novel, The Ghost Sister (2001), is set in a lost colony (see ...
Lehr, Paul
(1930-1998) American artist. Lehr studied illustration at the prestigious Pratt Institute, where he worked under Stanley Meltzoff, an early influence on his art. His first sf cover – for the American edition of Jeffery Lloyd Castle's Satellite E One (1954) – is a realistic depiction of the construction of an unusually-shaped Space Station, and similar ...
Engelhardt, Frederick
(? - ) Author whose first published story was the serialized novella "General Swamp, C.I.C." (August-September 1939 Astounding), a routine adventure in which human colonies on Venus (see Colonization of Other Worlds) rebel against Earth. Ten further stories, not all sf, appeared in various Pulp magazines including The ...
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 ...