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Wednesday 22 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 20 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 ...
Bujold, Lois McMaster
(1949- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Barter" for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, March/April 1985. Almost all her published sf work is part of a loose series of often humorous adventures set in a future of feuding galactic colonies connected by Faster-than-Light "Wormhole jumps". Most of these stories feature members of ...
Rees, Rod
(1948- ) UK author, a former accountant, whose sf debut is the Demi-Monde tetralogy comprising The Demi-Monde: Winter (2011), The Demi-Monde: Spring (2012), The Demi-Monde: Summer (2013) and The Demi-Monde: Fall (2013). The Demi-Monde is a highly detailed Virtual Reality sustained by an advanced Quantum Computer and ostensibly designed ...
Adams, Scott
(1957-2026) US author and cartoonist best known for the Dilbert strip published from 1989, which when at its best superbly (in terms of concept and accuracy of Satire rather than quality of drawing) satirized contemporary office life and corporate incompetence. As with most ambitious modern comic strips, it segues frequently into sf and fantasy tropes – such as Robot office workers, wish-fulfilling ...
Wainscot Societies
In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the term "wainscots" [see links below] denotes the common Fantasy trope of people or societies who live in the margins of a dominant civilization or the literal wainscots of its buildings. The classic fantasy example is The Borrowers (1952) by Mary Norton (1903-1992), televised as The Borrowers (1992 six episodes) and filmed as ...
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 ...