SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Gorman, Ed
(1941-2016) US author, principally of crime, western and horror fiction, in which fields his reputation was high. He was active in Fandom in the 1950s and 1960s, in the latter decade publishing the Fanzine Ciln. His principal contribution to sf was his co-authorship as Richard Driscoll of the Star Precinct trilogy with Kevin D Randle; this opens with Star Precinct (1992) and ...
Douglas, Stuart
(? - ) UK author, editor and publisher who began to publish work of genre interest with "No Place Like Home" in the unofficial Doctor Who-related Original Anthology Shelf Life (anth 2008) edited by Julian Eales, David A McIntee and Adrian Middleton. In 2008 he founded the Edinburgh-based Obverse Books ...
Doxey, William
(1935-2017) US academic and author, known in sf terms solely for an unremarkable Near Future tale, ESPionage (1979). [JC]
Fixup
A term first used by A E van Vogt to describe a book made up of previously published stories fitted together – usually with the addition of newly written or published cementing material – so that they read as a novel. Aware that fixups are immensely more common in Genre SF than in any other literature in the world, we borrowed the term for the 1979 edition of this encyclopedia, and continue to use it now; an example is ...
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 ...