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 ...
Kendall, John
Pseudonym of UK author Margaret Maud Brash (1880-1965), author of historical novels under her own name. Her Scientific Romance, Unborn Tomorrow (1933) as John Kendall, describes an ultimately dysfunctional Eugenics-dominated Dystopia set in a 1996 UK dehumanized and regimented under Communist rule. The birth rate plummets in the States of the United World; worldly goods do not ...
Science Fiction
Science Fiction may be described as an interwoven array of texts set in worlds which do not exist but arguably could. (Fantasy is set in worlds which are impossible but which the story believes.) The crunch in this formulation is what "arguably" means, how properly to distinguish the arguable from the imaginable in the great cauldron of story of Fantastika; it might be suggested that to unpack the meaning of and to ...
Holst, Gustav
(1874-1934) British composer, of Latvian and Swedish extraction. Holst trained at the Royal College of Music and, partly on account of his socialist and vegetarian beliefs, met many important figures of the turn of the twentieth century, amongst them H G Wells and William Morris. Much of his music reflected his Indian-influenced spirituality: for instance his choral fantasia The Cloud Messenger (1912), based on ...
Deep Impact
Film (1998). DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures present a Zanuck/Brown production. Directed by Mimi Leder. Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin. Cast includes Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Téa Leoni and Elijah Wood. 121 minutes. Colour. / In this old-fashioned Disaster movie, humanity's future is threatened by a large Comet on a course to collide with the Earth. ...
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 ...