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Friday 17 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 ...
Revis, Beth
(1981- ) US author of the Across the Universe sequence, beginning with Across the Universe (2011), a Generation Starship tale for the Young Adult market, whose main action occurs about half a century before reaching Alpha Centauri, after a teenage girl awakens early from Cryogenic sleep to find a complexly dysfunctional ...
Hall, Louisa
(1982- ) US academic, poet and author who is of sf interest for her second novel, Speak (2015), a multi-voiced tale moderated and in part iterated by AIs, who have come to something like self-consciousness through a radical concept underlying their development: that consciousness is not generated by number-crunching but through the centripetal magnetism through time of storytelling. The figures depicted range from a young seventeenth ...
Souza, Steven M
(1953- ) US author of The Espers (1972), set initially on an Earth dominated from time immemorial by an Alien race of Secret Masters who have prevented Homo sapiens's natural evolution (see Arrested Development); the protagonist's Amnesia is explained by the fact that he is a Weapon in a long ...
Bedford, Jacey
(? - ) UK author, folk singer and folk-song tour organizer who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Jewel of Locaria" in Warrior Princesses (anth 1998) edited by Martin H Greenberg and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Her first novel, Empire of Dust (2014), opens the Psi-Tech Space Opera trilogy ...
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 ...