SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Man or Astro-Man?
Rock band formed in Auburn, Alabama, in the early 1990s, core members being Star Crunch, Birdstuff and Coco, The Electronic Monkey Wizard. They might be Aliens who crashlanded on Earth, as they claim, or Brian Causey, Brian Teasley and Robert DelBueno. Musically recapturing the sound of the instrumental surf-guitar music of early 1960s acts like Dick Dale and the Chantays, but with an added punk gusto; they are steeped in sf influences, particularly 1950s/1960s ...
Star Raiders
Videogame (1979). Atari. Designed by Doug Neubauer. Platforms: Atari8 (1979); Atari5200, AtariVCS (1982); AtariST (1986; vt ST Star Raiders). / Star Raiders was the first real time three-dimensional space combat game which combined arcade elements (see Videogames) with strategic aspects derived from text-based Star Trek games (see ...
Postmodernism and SF
"Modernism" is a useful term for the literature that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century to challenge the mimetic conventions of bourgeois fiction, but Postmodernism is not simply its more recent replacement. In fact, most contemporary serious writing remains insistently Modernist. The relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism (see Modernism in SF) is difficult to discuss, not least because the term "Postmodernism" has been used to point ...
Johns, Stratford
(1925-2002) South African actor, in the UK from 1948; best known for his long stint as Barlow in the BBC television police procedural series Z Cars, and its sequels and spin-offs, between 1962 and 1976. His sf novel for Young Adult readers, Gumphlumph (1966), about an Alien visitor to Earth, is of modest interest. [JC]
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 ...