SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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 ...
Skaife, S H
(1889-1976) UK-born entomologist and author, in South Africa from 1913; most of his work comprises either technical studies or descriptions of the natural world for general readers. Of sf interest is The Strange Old Man (coll of linked stories 1930), tales in which the Drug-enabled Miniaturization of two children allows them, under the guidance of the eponymous scientist, to tour the air, the land, and ...
Kelly, Robert
(1935- ) US academic, poet – extremely prolific from about 1960, with at least fifty volumes published – and author. His novel The Scorpions (1967) has been read as sf because of its baroquely Paranoid rendering of a psychiatrist's conviction that a rich patient does in fact have contact with the Scorpions, a race of ultraviolet people (see Psychology). However, like Cities ...
Tidhar, Lavie
(1976- ) Israeli-born author, in the UK from 2013, most of whose work can perhaps be most easily described in terms of Equipoisal Fantastika and Postmodernism, as his frequent use of Genre SF topoi is deliberately estranged. As a teenager he moved with his family to South Africa where he began to read and write in ...
Kenyon, Tim
(? - ) UK author of an sf novel, Ersatz Nation (2002), set in two Parallel Worlds, one our own, and a second, a Dystopian counterpart to ours run by an entity known as Mother Necessity, who must (rather tamely) be overthrown. [JC]
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 ...