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Saturday 12 September 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 7 September 2026
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Watson, John B
(1878-1958) US psychologist and author, the principal figure in the creation and advancement of the school of behaviourism that dominated modern American Psychology for many decades (its influence was greatest in the US). He is of little direct sf interest, though indirectly his theory and practice can be seen to tacitly underlie much Genre SF, in tales where it is assumed that any child can gain competence, and even ...
Swift, Morrison I
(1856-1946) US political thinker, agitator and author whose early anarchism, which brought him fame, decayed in his old age into antisemitic fascism; his novels come from his earlier years. He published three novels of some interest: A League of Justice; Or, Is It Right to Rob the Robbers? (1893) is set in a Near Future America bedevilled by inequality, but transformed into a just society by the eponymous league, which robs the rich and gives to the ...
Alexander, Roger
Pseudonym of Jon William Nagel (1942- ), US author of Glimpses (1995), in which the human race, stored in Computer files, plans to send a representative sample of humanity to the stars; but Antichrist (see Religion) intervenes. [JC]
Meltzoff, Stanley
(1917-2006) US commercial artist who became best known for his paintings of game fish and underwater scenes. He worked in oils, and in the 1950s produced a series of influential paperback sf covers in realistic mode for the Signet imprint of New American Library. These included the 1953 paperbacks of Isaac Asimov's The Currents of Space (October-December 1952 Astounding; 1952) and A ...
Schildiner, Frank
(? - ) US author much of whose work samples familiar (and sometimes less familiar) figures from Pulp literature, usually French, both fantastic and nonfantastic, in complicatedly juggled narratives. Most of his work manipulates the networks of association of Fantastika, though the sf element in this weaving of story-types is not often dominant. The Frankenstein sequence beginning with ...
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 ...