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Sunday 19 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 ...
King, Reed
Pseudonym of unidentified US author (? - ) whose only publication under this name, FKA USA (2019), is a gonzo distant Near Future tale set in a balkanized America and describing a road-trip from what was once Missouri, but is now Crunch, United Colonies, to California. In 2085, all the Climate-Change and Ecological ...
Mason, David
Working name of US author Samuel Mason (1924-1974) who began publishing with "Placebo" in Infinity Science Fiction for November 1955; he was married 1956-1962 to Katherine MacLean. Most of his novels – such as his first, Kavin's World (1969), and its sequel in the Kavin sequence, The Return of Kavin (1972) – were routine ...
Lee, Tanith
(1947-2015) UK author whose married name since 1992 was Tanith Lee Kaiine, though she continued to write under her own name; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Eustace" in The Ninth Pan Book of Horror Stories (anth 1968) edited by Herbert van Thal. Her first books were fantasies for children, beginning with The Dragon Hoard (1971); and then, beginning with The Birthgrave (1975), she focused primarily on ...
Jackson, G Gibbard
(1877-1935) UK author, usually of tales for boys on aeronautical subjects, and of nonfiction about air travel and other related topics; of sf interest is Arctic Air Terror (1937), a Lost Race tale set in the Yukon Territory. Within a caldera heated by volcanic action, a technologically advanced but priest-ridden civilization of "white Indians", originally from Ancient Egypt, uses its helicopter-like airships ...
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 ...