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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 ...
Ghosh, Puloma
(? - ) Indian-born author, in US from early childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "K" in One Story for 21 October 2021, much of whose work has been assembled as Mouth (coll 2024). Her stories comprise an intensely Equipoisal traversal and scrutiny of the toolkit of contemporary Fantastika; few of her tales are, therefore, in any traditional sense, ...
Strange Plasma
US Semiprozine, letter-size, published by Edgewood Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and edited by Steve Pasechnick. Intended to be quarterly the magazine ran for eight occasional issues, once or twice a year between Summer 1989 and Winter 1994, Pasechnick openly admitting that producing a Small Press magazine was "far more difficult" than he had imagined. Subtitled "speculative + imaginative fiction", ...
Universe [game]
Videogame (1983). Omnitrend Software (OS). Designed by Thomas Carbone, William Leslie III. Platforms: Atari8 (1983); AppleII (1984); DOS (1987). / Universe, a largely text-based game with some outline graphics which is played in turns, is an interesting precursor to the space exploration form of Space Sim, of which the first true example was Elite (1984). As in a ...
Ure, Jean
(1943- ) UK author of a wide range of fiction for Young Adult readers, her active career beginning with the nonfantastic Dance for Two (1960) and continuing for well over half a century. Relatively little of her work is of sf interest, the main exception being the dark Plague 99 sequence comprising Plague 99 (1989; vt Plague 1991), Come Lucky April (1992; vt ...
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 ...