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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Encino Man
Film (1992; vt California Man). Hollywood Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company), Touchwood Pacific Partners I, Warner Bros. Produced by George Zaloom. Directed by Les Mayfield. Written by Shawn Schepps, based on a story by Schepps and Zaloom. Cast includes Sean Astin, Brendan Fraser and Pauly Shore. 88 minutes. Colour. / Limp version of the old story of the caveman who is dug up and resuscitated, as previously seen in ...
Franklin, Stephen
(1922-1985) Canadian journalist and author, in whose Knowledge Park (1972), the Ontario-Quebec border north of Lake Abitibi houses a community of electronically conjoined Libraries in an edificial Keep known as the Igloos of Minerva, which comes to contain the shared memories of human civilization. [JC]
Slonczewski, Joan
(1956- ) US professor of biology, specializing in genetics, and author who began publishing sf with her first novel, Still Forms on Foxfield (1980), a tale in which most of her subsequent concerns take initial shape. A human community of Quakers, having fled an apparently doomed Earth and having establishing on the planet Foxfield a sane and Ecology-obedient relationship with the native species, is contacted centuries later by a ...
Owen, Walter
(1884-1953) Scottish translator, poet and author; rejected despite several attempts for active service in World War One as he was blind in one eye; he published his early poetry privately as by Gauthier de St Ouen, the only title surviving in general catalogues being The Sonnets of G S O: A Memorial (coll 1940); in 1902 he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and apart from occasional excursions elsewhere remained there for the rest of his life; ...
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 ...