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Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
MacLennan, Hugh
(1907-1990) Canadian author who early published two Dystopian tales, "The Finding of the Way" (29 April 1955 The Montrealer) and "Remembrance Day, 2010 A.D." (December 1957 The Montrealer), but almost all of whose works, like his second novel, Two Solitudes (1945), lay outside the field and were shaped by the search for a Canadian national myth. His only sf novel, Voices in Time (1980), whose ...
Munro, John
(1849-1930) UK engineer, professor of mechanical engineering at Bristol, and author of three tales of sf interest, "Sun-Rise in the Moon" (October 1894 Cassell's Magazine), "A Message from Mars" (March 1895 Cassell's Family Magazine) and A Trip to Venus (1897, incorporating "A Message from Mars" above as chapter one). The novel is an unexceptional account of a journey by Spaceship – powered by a new ...
Webb, Don
(1960- ) US author and high school English teacher who began to publish sf with "Rhinestone Manifesto" in Interzone #13, Autumn 1985. His first book, Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book (coll 1987), winner of the Fiction Collective Award, declared his capacity for formal inventiveness and his technical affinities for the literary avant garde. A native Texan, Webb was educated at the University of Texas at Austin, and has published three ...
Hanshew, T W
(1857-1914) US-born author, in the UK from 1892, active as a writer of Pulp-magazine fiction and creator of the flamboyant burglar-turned-detective Hamilton Cleek (or rather, as he signs his early letters to Scotland Yard, "The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek"), introduced in a series of magazine stories beginning with "The Man of the Forty Faces" (August 1910 People's Ideal Fiction Magazine) and in book form as The Man of the Forty Faces ...
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 ...