SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Highwayman, The
US tv series (1987-1988). Glen A Larson Productions/20th Century Fox Television for NBC-TV. Created by Glen A Larson, also executive producer. Directors included Rob Bowman, Douglas Heyes and Larry Shaw. Writers included Larson, Burt Pearl and Steven L Sears. Cast includes Jane Badler, Mark "Jacko" Jackson, Sam J Jones and Tim Russ. Narrator: William Conrad (uncredited). One 90-minute pilot film plus nine 60-minute episodes. Colour. / Sometime in the ...
Westfahl, Gary
(1951- ) American academic and critic. After receiving a PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University in 1986, he worked until 2011 at the University of California, Riverside, then taught at the University at La Verne before retiring in 2017 and receiving the title of professor emeritus. His first major project was a series of contentious articles in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, based on ...
Reeves-Stevens, Garfield
(1953- ) US-born Canadian author who often signs his name Gar Reeves-Stevens, and who has also written as by Greg Reeves; he began writing works of genre interest with Bloodshift (1981), a Vampire tale which – not unusually for this author – intermixes sf, fantasy and horror: a professional killer is hired by establishment vampires to find a renegade female vampire who is interfering with the sf-like Phoenix Project, ...
Dianetics
According to its adherents a science, according to its disbelievers a Pseudoscience, founded by L Ron Hubbard, at the time a pulp writer whose main market was the sf magazines. Hubbard's sf had always emphasized the powers of the mind and deployed protagonists who maintained to the end a heroic stance against a corrupt Universe. The former interest was translated into real-life terms in the late 1940s, and the latter vision ...
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 ...