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Friday 17 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 ...
Alden, W L
(1837-1908) US lawyer, diplomat, journalist (mostly for the New York Times) and author, in the UK from 1893 (but he died back in the US), a founding member of the Theosophical Society in 1875 (see Theosophy), though he was soon disillusioned and resigned; he began publishing pieces – mostly nonfiction, though there is no comprehensive bibliography – in American magazines in the 1870s, where his advocacy of the canoe for sporting purposes was ...
Sarban
Pseudonym of UK author John W Wall (1910-1989), a career diplomat for the UK from 1933 until his retirement in 1966. Most of the short stories assembled in Ringstones, and Other Curious Tales (coll 1951) and The Doll Maker, and Other Tales of the Uncanny (coll 1953) [for vts see Checklist] are fantasy, but the haunting and nightmarish The Sound of His Horn (1952) has often been understood as sf in a generalized sense by critics (see ...
Liu, Ken
(1976- ) US lawyer, computer programmer and author of Chinese ancestry, whose full legally adopted name is Kenneth Yukun Liu. His work often focuses on the cultural or Linguistic intersections between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds. Emigrating to the US as a child, he graduated from Harvard Law School and had his sf debut with "Carthaginian Rose" (in ...
Land, Jon
(1957- ) US author, frequently of Technothrillers that maintain an edgy proximity to full sf, particularly in the Blaine McCracken series beginning with The Omega Command (1984) and ending with Dead Simple (1998), the last being typical in its use of an Invention just beyond current Technology – in this case a new explosive – to ...
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 ...