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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 ...
Stabenow, Dana
(1952- ) US author now best known for a nonfantastic private-investigator series, the Kate Shugak sequence set in the author's native Alaska. Her first fiction, however, was sf: the Star Svensdotter sequence comprising Second Star (1991), A Handful of Stars (1991) and Red Planet Run (1995), which describes the fraught Near Future expansion of Homo sapiens starwards, thwarted by ...
Horstman, Thomas
(? - ) US author of a borderline sf tale, The Kessler Alliance (1980), in which a cadre of Nazis hopes to rule the world as Hitler might have (see Hitler Wins for discussion of genuine Alternate Histories on these lines); a sense of Paranoia is duly stirred. [JC]
Rome, Alger
Collaborative pseudonym used by Jerome Bixby and Algis Budrys, on "Underestimation" (September 1953 Rocket Stories). [PN] links / Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader
US Digest-size magazine, two issues in 1953, published by Avon Books; edited by Sol Cohen. A hybrid successor to the Avon Fantasy Reader and Avon Science Fiction Reader, the Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader series started a year after those had ceased publication and had a different policy, concentrating on original stories rather ...
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 ...