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Saturday 18 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 ...
Downing, Charles
(? -? ) US author in whose Near Future tale, The Reckoning (1927), the Japanese Invasion by air of California (see Yellow Peril) causes the destruction of Los Angeles. Full-scale War then begins. [JC]
McCutcheon, Pam
(1955- ) US Air Force officer (retired), civil servant and author who is primarily of sf interest for her romantic Delphi sequence, a Planetary Romance beginning with Golden Prophecies (1995), set mainly on the lost colony planet Delphi, with some implication that a Long Night had passed before its rediscovery. Visiting Terrans on rehabilitative missions find ...
Sinclair, Upton
(1878-1968) US playwright and author known primarily for his work outside the sf field, particularly for his "muckraker" novels of social criticism, including The Jungle (25 February-4 November 1905 Appeal to Reason; rev 1906) and Oil! (1927), the latter filmed as There Will be Blood (2007); and for The Gnomobile: A Gnice Gnew Gnarrative with Gnonsense, but Gnothing Gnaughty (1936), a juvenile fantasy which was filmed by Disney as ...
Allington, Patrick
(? - ) Australian journalist and author whose first novel, the nonfantastic Figurehead (2009), is a political thriller whose narrative develops the implications of the Pol Pot massacres in Cambodia from 1975. He is of sf interest for his second novel, Rise & Shine (2020), set in an abstract, desiccated Near Future world where, after catastrophic Ecological collapse ...
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 ...