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Sunday 19 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 ...
Nicholson, Geoff
(1953-2025) UK author most of whose work, often involving street-wise gonzo explorations of psyches and geographies, lies along the water margins of Fantastika; a tale like Bleeding London (1997), for instance, reads as though his unpacking of the fantasticated London at its heart represented a literal gazeteer: but, like most psychogeographies (see Iain Sinclair), it penetrates ...
Smaill, Anna
(1979- ) New Zealand author whose first novel, The Chimes (2015), artfully conceals its distant Near Future setting in a London which may be viewed as a Dystopia, as it is oppressively guild-dominated and under something like a curse, which may be nothing more than the effects of twenty-first century global despoliation. At the same time, however, a detailed and subtle ...
Allorge, Henri
(1878-1938) French poet and author, who worked in a civilian capacity for the Ministry of War during World War One, which nevertheless affected him strongly. In his first sf novel, Le Grand Cataclysme: roman du centième siècle (1922; trans Brian Stableford as The Great Cataclysm: A Romance of the Hundredth Century 2011), a great earlier Disaster has ...
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 ...
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 ...