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Sunday 19 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 ...
Ryan, Desmond
(1943-2011) UK-born journalist and author, in the US from 1967, whose very Near Future medical Technothriller, Helix (1979) with Joel N Shurkin, extrapolates from the real effects of Legionnaire's Disease to depict a virulent nationwide Pandemic. [JC]
Rosenblum, J Michael
(1917-1978) One of the early major figures in UK Fandom, active from the mid-1930s in the Leeds sf group, about whose internal controversies he wrote in Thrilling Wonder Stories for February 1938; he attended the historically important 1937 Convention held in Leeds, West Yorkshire. His Fanzines included The Futurian (8 issues 1938-1940), its ...
Melville, Herman
(1819-1891) US author whose first professional publication, "Fragments from a Writing Desk" (4-18 May 1839 Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser), is an exercise in Gothic grotesquerie. He is of course best known for such radically symbolic novels as The Whale (1851 3vols; vt Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale 1851 2vols), a multi-genre immensity that in its omnivorous ambition to say everything possible about everything may be as close to an American epic as ...
Best of Omni Science Fiction
US anthology series that was an offshoot of Omni magazine but which also published original material. The first volume, edited by Ben Bova and Don Myrus, published in March 1980, was all reprint, but was so successful, selling over 300,000 copies in three months, that consideration was given to issuing an all-sf Magazine. In the end a compromise was reached, with each volume a ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...