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 ...
Cameron, James
(1954- ) Canadian-born film-maker. Originally a special-effects man and art director with Roger Corman's New World – where he worked on Battle beyond the Stars (1980), Android (1982) and several others including Escape from New York (1981), for which New World did the special effects – ...
California
It is easy to concur with the adage that California was not so much discovered as invented: that California is, therefore, pure sf. A rhetorically and pragmatically attractive underlying premise of this sort arguably infuses central anatomies of the state like Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and elsewhere. Certainly, with the possible exception of the legend of El Dorado, there is little before 1800 that ...
Nagamatsu, Sequoia
(1982- ) US academic, editor and author who began publishing work of interest with "Kenta's Posthumous Chrysanthemum" in New Delta Review for 2010, which appeared in his first collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (coll 2016). He is of sf interest for his first novel, How High We Go in the Dark (2022), in which a deadly Pandemic is caused when a virus escapes from the remains of a newly exhumed ...
Calkins, Dick
Working name of US Comic-strip illustrator Richard T Calkins (1894-1962), who was born in Grand Rapids and studied at the Art Institute in Chicago. Beginning in 1929, Philip Francis Nowlan scripted and Calkins illustrated Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a comic strip based on Nowlan's "Armageddon – 2419 A.D." (August 1928 Amazing) and "The ...
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 ...