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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 ...
Nagpal, Veena
(1942- ) Indian author of Adventure in Space; And, the Time Travellers (coll 1967 India), in which Space Opera and Time Travel conventions are adapted, perhaps not vigorously enough, to her native venue. [JC]
Stickgold, Bob
(1945- ) US neurobiologist, psychiatrist specializing in sleep research and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Susie's Reality" in the UK edition of Worlds of If (see If) for May-June 1973. His first sf novel, Gloryhits (1978) with Mark Noble, deals with a Disaster following upon research in recombinant DNA, a government-funded ...
Reed, Marguerite
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Bearing Witness", serialized in two parts in Strange Horizons for 14 and 21 November 2005. Her novel Archangel (2015), first in the intended series The Chronicles of Ubastis, centres on a human research colony (see Colonization of Other Worlds) of ...
Stabenow, Dana
(1952- ) US author now best known for a nonfantastic private-investigator series, the Kate Shugak sequence set in the author's native Alaska. Her first fiction, however, was sf: the Star Svensdotter sequence comprising Second Star (1991), A Handful of Stars (1991) and Red Planet Run (1995), which describes the fraught Near Future expansion of Homo sapiens starwards, thwarted by ...
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 ...