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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 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 ...
Wentworth, K D
(1951-2012) US editor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Daddy's Girls" in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume V (anth 1989) edited by A J Budrys; for several years before her death after a long illness that affected her writing career, Wentworth herself edited this Original Anthology series, beginning with ...
Price, Georges
Pseudonym of French author Ferdinand Petitpierre (1853-1922), in whose sf novel, Les Trois Disparus du "Sirius" ["The Three Missing Men from the 'Sirius'"] (1896; trans Brian Stableford as The Missing Men of the Sirius 2015), three sailors whose ship has sunk have extraordinary adventures Under the Sea, finding an Ancient Egyptian ...
Taffrail
Pseudonym of UK naval officer and author Henry Taprell Dorling (1883-1968), in the UK navy from 1897 through World War One, retiring in 1929; he served again during World War Two. He began his prolific career as an author with All About Ships: A Book for Boys (1912), almost all his work being nonfantastic stories of the sea, and came to some attention late in life when it was suggested that his early novel, ...
Steuart, John A
(1861-1932) Scottish-born editor and author, in Canada for some years, subsequently in England. The Club Stories assembled as The Jolly Pashas: The Story of an Unphilanthropic Society (coll of linked stories 1892) are essentially nonfantastic, or debunked [see Rationalized Fantasy in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In the Day of Battle (1894) 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 ...