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Wednesday 22 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 20 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 ...
Ruocchio, Christopher
(? - ) US editor and author whose Sun Eater sequence beginning with Empire of Silence (2018) and Howling Dark (2019) ambitiously invokes former versions of the long-breathed dynastic epic set in the context of the Galactic Empire. Earlier writers and their work conspicuously addressed include Gordon R Dickson, whose Dorsai series features a ...
Salisbury, H B
(? -? ) US author of a Utopia, Miss Worden's Hero; Or, the Birth of Freedom (November 1890-April 1891 The Nationalist; 1890; vt The Birth of Freedom: A Socialist Novel 1894), where a great cataclysm makes possible in America the rational establishment of an ideal society on socialist lines. [JC]
Brunt, Captain Samuel
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? - ) of A Voyage to Cacklogallinia; with a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of that Country (1727); the facsimile edition of this rare text (1940), with an introduction by Marjorie Nicolson, is useful; the novel itself, best understood as a Satire on British politics, commerce and culture, takes Captain ...
Operator #5
US Pulp magazine, 48 issues, April 1934 to November/December 1939, published by Popular Publications; edited by Rogers Terrill, originally monthly and then alternated between bimonthly and monthly. This was one of the livelier and more successful hero/villain pulps, thematically more ambitious than most, as it changed after the first twenty issues into a set of Future War narratives garishly prefiguring ...
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 ...