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Tuesday 14 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 13 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 more than 180 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Walker, Paul
(1942-2007) US critic and author in whose sf novel, Who Killed Utopia (1980), the first murder to have taken place for a century brings suspicion upon the poet/Computer at the heart of things. Walker contributed book reviews to Galaxy in 1978, and in the same year published a collection of thirty-one sometimes very informative postal Interviews, ...
British Fantasy Society
1. The first British Fantasy Society was sf-based and operated from 1942 to 1946. It was a precursor of the British Science Fiction Association founded in 1958: see this entry for further details. The Society's British Fantasy Society Bulletin (which see) was circulated with Futurian War Digest. / links / ...
Whiteside, Edward
(? - ) US author of the Near Future A Warning from Mars (1948 chap), set on Mars, here known as Amkonia, where free enterprise has flourished until a New-Deal-like socialist Dystopia takes over and ruins the planet; the Satire is heavy, and an inserted history of freed slaves, here known as Boogaloos, is intensely unpleasant. ...
Miéville, China
(1972- ) UK author most of whose early work can be understood in terms of Dark Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] or horror (see Horror in SF), but who has become a central figure in early twenty-first-century Fantastika. Beginning with his first novel, King Rat (1998), his narratives constantly feed upon ...
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 ...