SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Chatterton, E Keble
(1878-1944) UK author, active from around the turn of the century, best known for nonfiction works on maritime history, and for his dramatic depictions of naval warfare; he commanded a navy mine-sweeper during World War One. Of his fiction, the Z-Rays sequence – comprising Through Sea and Air (1929), Adventurers of the Air (1930) and The Sky Riders (1930) – is of most sf interest, as a European ...
Etchemendy, Nancy
(1952- ) US author of some sf novels for Young Adult readers. The Watchers of Space (1980) and its sequel The Crystal City (1985) are Space Operas with a contemplative edge; other titles include Stranger from the Stars (1983) and The Power of Un (2000), a Time Travel tale which emphasizes the moral fixity of that which ...
Roscoe, Theodore
(1906-1992) US biographer, naval historian and author whose I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) is a locked-room mystery set in a Near Future Europe about to go to war. Of fairly moderate genre interest are the Thibaut Corday stories, featuring the eponymous Pulp magazines hero in exotic adventures; they are assembled in The Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh [and] The Bearded Slayer (coll circa 1939), ...
Alternate Worlds
An alternate world – some writers and commentators prefer the designation "alternative world" on grammatical grounds – is an account of Earth as it might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in history. Many sf stories use Parallel Worlds as a frame in which multiple alternate worlds can coexist, sometimes interacting with one another. Previous editions of this encyclopedia discussed ...
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 ...