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
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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 ...
Kadohata, Cynthia
(1956- ) US author who has focused primarily on Young Adult fiction, most of it nonfantastic. Of sf interest is In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in a Near Future Los Angeles, which has by 2052 become an impoverished, ill-governed, hardscrabble. Dystopian enclave. The protagonist, unusually for an sf novel set in ...
Sardinia
The second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, Sardinia (see Italy) has a mountainous interior and is filled with mysterious cone-shaped structures called "nuraghi", fashioned in prehistoric times (likely 1500-400 BCE) out of blocks of basalt from extinct volcanoes. Italian, Sardinian, Catalan, and Arabic are all spoken on the island, which has a complex history of conquests, most notably by the Spanish (1321-1720), but also the Romans, Arabs, Austrians ...
Starling, Caitlin
(? - ) US interactive game designer and author who is of sf interest for her first novel, The Luminous Dead (2019), is set mostly Underground on a planet exploited primarily for its mineral deposits (see Colonization of Other Worlds); the protagonist, contracted to explore yet unknown cave systems for further resources, finds herself caught between the chthonic ...
Bridgeman, Amanda
(? - ) Australian author whose Aurora sequence beginning with Darwin (2013 ebook) is set in a moderately distant Near Future galaxy, into which Homo sapiens is edgily expanding. In the first volume, a human force (see Military SF) must explore a mysterious abandoned Space Station, a mission complicated by a passel of new ...
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 ...