SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 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
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Gale, Oliver Marble
(1876-1943) US author of some sf interest for Carnack – The Life-Bringer: The Story of a Dawn Man Told by Himself (1928), an example of Prehistoric SF whose protagonist, a Prometheus figure, sometimes resembles Tarzan (see Edgar Rice Burroughs). In the end, his innovations are too much for the proto-humans who surround him, and he is driven into exile with his woman, in ...
Mythology
The relationship of mythology to sf is close and deep, but not always obvious. Part of the confusion stems from the widely held belief that sf is itself a form of latter-day mythology, fulfilling comparable hungers in us. James Blish took issue with this argument, pointing out that myth is usually "static and final in intent and thus entirely contrary to the spirit of sf, which assumes continuous change". We restrict ourselves below to the role of ...
Bionic Woman, The
1. US tv series (1976-1978). Harve Bennett Productions and Universal for ABC. Created and produced by Kenneth Johnson. Cast includes Lindsay Wagner. Three seasons, 57 50-minute episodes. Colour. / In this spinoff from the successful Harve Bennett series The Six Million Dollar Man – its first episode being Part 2 of a story begun in the parent ...
Weiss, Sara
(? -1904) US author of the Ento sequence comprising Journeys to the Planet Mars (1903) and Decimon Hûŷdas: A Romance of Mars (1906) [for further data on both titles see Checklist below]; Sara Weiss herself reports, via psychic messages, on the Utopia flourishing on Mars centuries previous, including advanced forms of Transportation (such as the ...
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 ...