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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 ...
Sloan, Robin
(1979- ) US author whose Penumbra sequence beginning with Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (short version 2009 Escape Pod EP215; 2012) is set mainly in and around the eponymous very Near Future (dating from 2009) San Francisco bookshop (see California), and sf and fantasy turns (see Equipoise) to explore the nature of the physical book, its cultural ...
Space Quest
Videogame series (from 1986). Sierra On-Line (SOL). / Space Quest is a series of linearly plotted graphical Adventures in which the player adopts the role of Roger Wilco, a janitor in a Space Opera universe who strongly resembles the protagonist of the text-based Planetfall (1983). The games' parodic style of humour and comic puzzles are alternately ...
Household, Geoffrey
(1900-1988) UK author whose life abroad between about 1920 and 1945 was exceedingly catch-as-catch-can, though he left the army after World War Two as a Lieutenant-Colonel. He remains best known for Rogue Male (1939), filmed as Man Hunt (1941) directed by Fritz Lang, a dark and solitudinous updating of the thrillers of John Buchan, whose protagonist misses a chance to assassinate Hitler (unnamed in the ...
Fahy, Christopher
(1937-2024) US author whose first works – like The Compost Heap (1970) – convey in mundane contexts a quiet enragedness that may initially seem scattershot. After his first story with genre content, "Carnival" in Gallery for August 1980 – assembled with much of his short fiction of fantastic interest in Matinee at the Flame (coll 2006) – most of his later work of interest is Horror, though ...
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 ...