SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 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
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Todd, Larry S
(1948-2024) US author and illustrator who began to publish work of genre interest with cartoons in Imagination from the June 1956 issue. His first prose story was "Simon Says" in If for June 1965, as Lawrence S Todd; he also published stories in Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow in the 1960s, and contributed artwork to all three magazines. In the 1970s he collaborated with ...
Morghen, Filippo
(1739-1807 or after) Italian printmaker and engraver, born in Florence but working in Naples from circa 1760. Much of his work comprised engravings of the antiquities of Italy, such as the ruined cities of Paestum and Herculaneum, showing their architecture, frescoes, statues and other art. / However, Morghen also produced Raccolta delle cose più notabili veduta dal cavaliere Wilde Scull, e dal Sigr: de la Hire nel lor famoso viaggio dalla Terra alla Luna ["Collection ...
Osborn, Christopher
(? - ) UK concert pianist, teacher and author whose first novel, A Sense of Touch (1989), is nonfantastic; his second, Unbound (2017), sensitively depicts a molecular biologist's unrelenting search for Immortality through Drugs, during the course of which he becomes addicted to a drug known as Telos, which treats ageing as an auto-immune disorder. A ...
Savile, Frank
(1865-1950) UK author who began his writing career under the alias Knarf Elivas (his own names reversed) with John Ship, Mariner (1898), an historical nautical adventure set at the time of the Spanish Armada. His next novel, The Foray of the "Hendrik Hudson" (1898), the first under his own name, is a non-fantasy involving a treasure hunt across Russia and Finland in search of a Viking hoard. This sequence of nautical tales ended in a fully-fledged fantastic ...
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 ...