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Friday 17 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 ...
Rimworld
A common item of sf Terminology, denoting a planet in the galactic rim region (see Galactic Lens). Rimworlds are of importance in John Brunner's Interstellar Empire sequence and provide the various settings of A Bertram Chandler's John Grimes/Rim World stories; early stories in Frank Herbert's ...
Lyon, E D
(1825-1891) UK soldier, Governor of Dublin District Military Prison 1854-1856; commercial photographer from 1865 in India and elsewhere; and author whose Near Future sf novel, Ireland's Dream: A Romance of the Future (1888 2vols), set in a chaotic independent Ireland; its depiction of the consequences of the end of British rule (see Politics) is savagely unfriendly to the Irish, confessing inter alia to a ...
Kaufelt, David A
(1939-2014) US author best known for the nonfantastic Wyn Lewis Series, featuring a female detective on Long Island, New York. Of sf interest is Spare Parts (1978), a medical thriller set in New York in the very Near Future, where human organs and limbs are being sold to the rich. [JC]
Schenck, Hilbert
(1926-2013) US engineer, university lecturer and author who published his first sf story, "Tomorrow's Weather" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for April 1953, long before he became seriously (though briefly) involved in fiction; much of his nonfiction of the 1950s and 1960s dealt lovingly with the ocean and with oceanological research and exploration technologies. His first two novels are both set in the ocean-girt Cape Cod region of New England, ...
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 ...