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
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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 ...
Hollinger, Veronica
(1947- ) Canadian editor and academic, at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario until her retirement in 2016; she has been an editor of Science Fiction Studies from 1991, publishing with her co-editors two Anthologies of significance, On Philip K Dick: 40 Articles from Science Fiction Studies (anth 1992) with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, ...
Roberts, Andrew
(1963- ) UK journalist, historian and author much of whose work has focused on the history of Great Britain from a conservative position, during the course of which he has argued that George W Bush's term of office as American President was successful due to his prosecution of the second Iraq War. Of sf interest is The Aachen Memorandum (1995), a spoofish Near Future thriller in which UK fears of cultural obliteration within ...
Shedley, Ethan I
Pseudonym of Belgian-born software engineer and author Boris Beizer (1934-2018), in the US from May 1941; most of his publications [not listed below] concern computer system architecture and software testing. In his novel Earth Ship and Star Song (1979) the survivors of destructive Climate Change escape from the Ruined Earth, but while developing their Faster Than Light ...
Triplanetary
Board and counter Wargame (1973). Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). Designed by Marc Miller. / Triplanetary is an early space combat Wargame, noted for the elegance and simplicity of its design. Small numbers of spacecraft are represented by counters on a mapboard divided into hexagons, with a plastic overlay on which movement vectors can be drawn and erased. The system models Newtonian ...
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 ...