SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 14 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 League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Old Scout, An
House Name for authors working for the Boys' Papers publisher, Frank Tousey. Of sf interest under this name is Lost in the Great Basin (5 October-30 November 1889 The Boys of New York as by Kit Clyde 1907), which sets an Underground Lost World within a Western frame; the inhabitants of this world boast a complex civilization, which does not save ...
British Fantasy Society
1. The first British Fantasy Society was sf-based and operated from 1942 to 1946. It was a precursor of the British Science Fiction Association founded in 1958: see this entry for further details. The Society's British Fantasy Society Bulletin (which see) was circulated with Futurian War Digest. / links / ...
Sternberg, Jacques
(1923-2006) Belgian author who published fiction until the end of the century, though sf made up a decreasingly portion of his work; he moved at the end of his life to the memoir form. A particularly idiosyncratic author with a keen sense of the absurd, he built from the early 1950s a unique body of work, often only tenuously linked to sf, often structured as Satires where everyday situations logically degenerate into darkly humorous nightmares, his first novel being ...
Älgarnas Trädgård
["Garden of the Elks"] Swedish space-rock band, whose only release Framtiden är ett svävande skepp, förankrat i forntiden (1972) combines pseudo-medieval folk and futuristic psychedelic styles to surprisingly good effect. The title translates as "The Future is a Hovering Ship Anchored in the Past", and a time-clash science-fictional theme links the tracks. [AR] see also: SF Music. / links ...
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 ...