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Wednesday 15 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
O'Brien, Willis H
(1886-1962) US special-effects supervisor in the Cinema industry. For his own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A one-minute home movie of an animated caveman and Dinosaur, involving 960 separate exposures, led to the producer and exhibitor Herman Wobber (1880-1965) advancing him $5000 to make a more elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy ...
Wheeler, Scott
Nickname and working name of Donald Wheeler (1937-2016), US author whose Matters of Form (1987) depicts the long campaign of a group of Aliens, stranded on Earth in the twentieth century, to Uplift human civilization to a level at which interstellar Space Flight is possible. Later sections of the book, introducing a second (and evil) alien race, are less effective. [JC]
Hoornaert, Edward
(1981- ) Belgian author, now in the USA, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Devil, Devil" for On Spec in 2000; and whose sf novel, The Trial of Tompa Lee (2005), is, unusually for Military SF, a courtroom drama, set on an Alien planet. The spunky young protagonist manages to defend herself in the end against unjust charges. [JC]
Rice, Jeff
Working name of US author Jeffrey Grant Rice (1944-2015), best known for his novel The Night Stalker (written 1970; 1973), which before publication was adapted by Richard Matheson as the made-for-television film The Night Stalker (1972). The protagonist of both book and film is newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak, whose investigation of a serial killer leads to a Vampire culprit. The next, very ...
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 ...