SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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: David Cowhig
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 ...
Takachiho Haruka
Pseudonym of Kimiyoshi Takekawa (1951- ), a Japanese author of sf and heroic Fantasy. While still a social science student at Hōsei University in 1972, he co-founded the design company Crystal Arts. Renamed Studio Nue in 1974, it became an influential cog in the Anime industry, credited with contributions to ...
Defying Gravity
American-Canadian tv series (2009). British Broadcasting Corporation, Fox Television Studios, and Omni Film Productions for CTV, SPACE and ProSieben. Created by James D Parriot. Producers include Michael Chechik and Michael Edelstein. Writers include Parriot, Sheri Elwood, Meredith Lavender, and Marcie Ulin. Directors include Sturla Gunnarsson, David Straiton, Peter Howitt, Fred Gerber, and Jeff Woolnough. Cast includes Ron Livingston as Maddux Donner, Laura Harris as Zoe Barnes, Malik ...
Whiteside, Edward
(? - ) US author of the Near Future A Warning from Mars (1948 chap), set on Mars, here known as Amkonia, where free enterprise has flourished until a New-Deal-like socialist Dystopia takes over and ruins the planet; the Satire is heavy, and an inserted history of freed slaves, here known as Boogaloos, is intensely unpleasant. ...
Burgoyne, Alan Hughes
(1880-1929) UK politician – Unionist MP for Aylesbury from 1924 – and author, mostly on naval matters. Trafalgar Re-Fought (1905) with W Laird Clowes replays the Battle of Trafalgar in a twentieth-century setting. His Future War novel, The War Inevitable (1908), spends much of its time at sea in the context of the historical Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-1921, formally terminated 1923). A ...
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 ...