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Monday 20 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 20 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 ...
Spain
Mostly influenced by Jules Verne and Camille Flammarion, Spanish nineteenth-century Proto SF featured four voyage-to-the-Moon tales, beginning with the anonymous didactic utopia Viage de un filósofo a Selenópolis ["Selenopolis"] (1804); Joaquín Castillo y Mayone's oneiric story Zulema y Lambert ["Zulema and Lambert"] ...
Cohen, Barney
Working name of US author Bernard Halsband Cohen (1944- ), whose first novel of genre interest was The Night of the Toy Dragons (1977). The Taking of Satcon Station (1982) with Jim Baen, the first of two Asher Bockhorn sf thrillers, is an engagingly over-the-top application of private-eye idioms and plots (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon [1930] being much in evidence) to near space, the ...
Cannell, Stephen J
(1941-2010) US television producer, actor and scriptwriter, prolific in all these areas, much involved over the years in various manifestations of The Rockford Files; some of his work is horror. Of his fiction, mostly detective thrillers, Final Victim: A Novel (1996) is a noirish Near Future sf tale in which Cyberspace is inhabited by both a killer with a telegenic personality disorder, and by the team of ...
Lippincott, David
(1924-1984) US advertising executive, composer and author whose Near-Future political Satire E Pluribus Bang! (1970) finds the US President involved in the murder of a Secret Service agent he finds in bed with his wife in a story that climaxes on a South Pacific Island where the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance is solved. Tremor Violet (1975) is a ...
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 ...