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Tuesday 14 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 ...
Tilson, Jake
(1958- ) UK artist, graphic designer and author whose early work reflects various influences, including punk rock and underground Comics, perhaps primarily 2000 AD. Some of the graphic artists and painters who contributed to and/or influenced New Worlds in the 1960s may as well helped inspire Tilson's use of sf narrative motifs and image clusters in the creation of his "xerox books". ...
O'Nair, Mairi
Pseudonym of Canadian-born author Constance May Evans (1888-1982), in the UK from before World War One, who specialized in romance novels (at least 100 of them) between 1932 and 1971, under her own name and as O'Nair. Of sf interest is The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes (coll of linked stories 1935), featuring a young woman detective with the power of Telepathy, which helps her solve her cases. [JC]
Maddox, Michelle
Pseudonym of Canadian author Michelle Rouillard (1971- ) for her sf romance Countdown (2008), whose heroine must cope with psychic distress and what seems to be an imprisoning Pocket Universe from which to be rescued. Horror and fantasy novels under her own name are not listed below. [JC]
Gillette, King Camp
(1855-1932) US salesman and industrialist who partially invented and wholly made practicable the disposal safety razor, founding the company that now bears his name in 1901; his works as an author, sometimes as by King C Gillette, were universally focused on Utopian solutions to the dilemmas he saw infecting the rapidly expanding capitalist world, beginning with The Human Drift (1894), which advocates a socialist, pollution-free, non-competition-based ...
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 ...