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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.
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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 ...
Wilding, Philip
(1913-1971) UK author born Philip Wilding Wiggins but known by the shorter version of his name since before World War Two. He published in various genres, including Westerns as by Jefferson Fraser; his two routine sf adventures under his own name are Spaceflight – Venus (1955), in which a crew undertakes for the first time Space Flight to Venus, where an Alien ...
Ikeda Noriaki
(1955- ) Japanese author and producer, sometimes operating under the working name Kenshō Ikeda, an alternate reading of the characters that spell his name. A graduate in Literature from Komazawa University, he first gained attention as a critic and chronicler of Japan's distinctive Tokusatsu genre, in which rubber monsters and super-sized heroes duel in the streets of a model Tokyo. His magazine column "SF Hero ...
Gárcia y Robertson, R
(1949- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Flying Mountain" in Amazing for May 1987; some of his short fiction is assembled as The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures (coll 1998). Much of his work, short and long, either involves Time Travel to various eras, or is set in them; his range of protagonists is, in ethnic terms, extremely wide, and his use of characters ...
Hales, C L
Working name of UK author Charles Laurence Hales (1873-? ), a barrister-at-law whose occasional diversions included the proto-Cosy Catastrophe children's novel The Wooden Heads (1924 Chatterbox; 1926), about a family menaced by strange wooden-seeming beings in a London mysteriously emptied of people by some quirk of the Fourth Dimension. The household members ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...