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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.
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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 ...
Forest, Louis
Pseudonym of French lawyer, politician, playwright and author Louis Nathan (1872-1933), who is of sf interest for On Vole des Enfants à Paris ["We Steal Children in Paris"] (25 June-23 September 1906 Le Matin as "Le Voleur d'enfants"; cut 1909; trans Brian Stableford as Someone Is Stealing Children in Paris 2013), in which a morally ambivalent figure of German origin is enlisted to solve the mysterious kidnapping ...
Scott, Rion Amilcar
(? - ) US author whose fiction has been restricted to short forms; he began to publish work of genre interest with "Numbers" in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (anth 2014) edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older. Much of his work is set in the (fictional) town of Cross River, Maryland, founded in the early nineteenth century after a successful slave revolt (see Race in SF) ...
Bock, Dennis
(1964- ) Canadian teacher and author, active from the late 1990s, most of whose work has been nonfantastic. His first novel, Going Home Again (2013), is an analysis of the consequences of World War Two through the interwoven stories of its three afflicted protagonists. He is of specific sf interest for The Good German (2020), an Alternate History tale whose ...
Hartland, Christopher
(? - ) UK author whose self-identification as queer and autistic usefully frames the lines of energy driving his first novel, the Young Adult Against the Stars (2023), whose protagonist learns his true nature through a commercial Time Viewer device known as GlimpseTech. The 45 second "glimpse" given him into his future tells him who he's in love with; against an increasingly ...
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 ...