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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.
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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 ...
Brant, John Ira
(1872-1959) US inventor and author whose The New Regime: A. D. 2202 (1909) bases its vision of an international Utopia on the work of Edward Bellamy. Unusually, the "visitor" to this utopia is not a Sleeper Awakes figure but a contemporary man who has given himself Amnesia through Drug use, and must be reintroduced to his happy ...
Housman, Clemence
(1861-1955) UK artist, illustrator, suffragette, poet and author. She was the sister of the poet A E Housman (1859-1936), and illustrated some works by her younger brother Laurence Housman; he in turn illustrated her most famous tale, The Were-Wolf (December 1890 Atalanta; 1896), set in a far-northern clime, where twin brothers disagree over a female Mysterious Stranger. In order to defend his ...
Clark, Cumberland
(1862-1941) UK author, frequently on William Shakespeare, whose Dystopia, Fairy Tales of Socialism (1927), is a humorous Satire of Bolshevism. [JC]
Welford, Sue
(1942- ) UK author, in New Zealand from around 2005, almost all of whose work has been for children or Young Adult readers; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Flight for Freedom" in Fantastic Space Stories (anth 1994) edited by Tony Bradman. Her three series [none are listed below] are the Just George sequence for younger readers, and the Charlie Scroggins sequence and the St Jo's Hospital ...
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 ...