SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Horner, Donald W
(1874-1944) UK astronomer, meteorologist and author who specialized in popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910) offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech Near Future, featuring picturephones, television and electric cars, and describing the protagonists' usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism, though the inhabitants of ...
Brown, Timothy
(1961- ) US author whose first novel Polaris (2014) is a Near Future tale set in Death Valley (see California), an extreme environment which instantly evokes a sense that Climate Change may have deepened sufficiently to have created Ruined Earth conditions, and that the elderly protagonist of the tale, alone with a ...
Herbert, Brian
(1947- ) US author, son of Frank Herbert, who began publishing sf with his third book and first novel, Sidney's Comet: Being an Account of the Remarkable Events Which Occurred During the Approach of the Great Garbage Comet (1983), a comic Satire which launched the short Garbage Chronicles series; the eponymous Comet, composed of human garbage, threatens Earth in ...
Coen, Franklin
(1912-1990) US screenwriter, of greatest sf relevance for the script for This Island Earth (1955). He is the co-author of a film Tie, Meteor (1979) with Edmund H North, novelizing the feature film Meteor (1979). [JC]
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 ...