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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.
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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 ...
Mitchell, Kirk
(1950- ) US author and former police officer who began writing sf with the Procurator Alternate-History trilogy – Procurator (1984), New Barbarians (1986) and Cry Republic (1989) – based on the premise that Rome did not fall and that the world of 2000 CE reflects a mixture of Roman modes and richly conceived technologies; A D Anno Domini (1985), which is ...
Bennet, Robert Ames
(1870-1954) US author who concentrated on Westerns, and author of four novels of sf interest. In Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), three explorers, after nearly freezing to death, discover a Balloon which conveys them to a clement Lost World, hidden near the North Pole and full of prehistoric beasts, bestial ape-men (see Apes as Human), clairvoyant ...
Soto, Adam
(? - ) US musician, editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Animal Fires" in Fairy Tale Review: The Transcendent Issue (anth 2017) edited by Benjamin Schaefer. His first novel, This Weightless World (2021), is set initially in 2012 Chicago, just after SETI research has broken the news that a Communication has been received from an ...
Tepperman, Emile C
(1899-1951) US insurance broker and author, active in the 1930s and 1940s under his own name, beginning with "Satan's Scalpel" in Secret Agent "X" for March 1934, a Pulp magazine for which he also wrote several longer stories under the house name Brant House. He contributed several book-length instalments to the long Spider sequence of sf-inflected stories (see The ...
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 ...