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.
Site updated on 14 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 ...
Potocki, Jan
(1761-1815) Polish military engineer, ethnologist, linguist, traveller and author whose first stories – which show the influences of Arabian Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] – appeared in the 1780s, embedded into his travel books. He is best-known for Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse ["The Manuscript Found at Saragossa"], a complex text whose publication history is so convoluted ...
Beck, L Adams
Primary working name of UK-born author born Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862-1931), most of whose life was spent in various lands, including China and Japan; primarily in Canada from 1919; as well as L or Lily Adams Beck, she published under various iterations of her name (her second marriage was to Ralph Coker Adams Beck) including Elizabeth Louisa Beck, Elizabeth Louisa Moresby Beck, Louis Moresby and Lily Moresby Adams; she also published as by E Barrington. In general her work – which ...
Saklikar, Renée Sarojini
(? - ) Indian-born lawyer, poet and author, in Canada from childhood, active from 2010 or before; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Antony's Arboretum" in Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories (anth 2016) edited by Kelsi Morris and Kaitlin Tremblay. The ongoing THOT J BAP sequence, beginning with ...
Jobs in SF
Though it is a theme that may easily be overlooked, the future of occupations is as much an sf concern as technological developments, for the pair are interlinked (see also Slavery). Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; vt Blade Runner 1982), for example, is equally a tale of the workplace as it is an examination of Technology. The protagonist hunts ...
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 ...