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Tuesday 21 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 20 April 2026
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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 ...
Bruckner, Karl
(1906-1982) Austrian author almost all of whose 30 or so books – many of them written for children, many of them sf – remain untranslated. In Nur zwei Roboter? (1963; trans Frances Lobb as The Hour of the Robots 1964), Russian agents steal advanced Robot designs from America; fortunately, once the robots (named William and Natasha) are built, their mutual affection causes the world to look to peace. ...
Dunyach, Jean-Claude
(1957- ) French mathematician, aeronautical engineer and author, active from the early 1980s, his short stories being published in several volumes, beginning with Autoportrait ["Self-Portrait"] (coll 1986). Two volumes of translated tales have appeared. The Night Orchid: Conan Doyle in Toulouse (coll trans various 2004) may be initially most remarkable for its range, from Hard SF to ...
McNeilly, Wilfred Glassford
(1921-1983) Scottish author of numerous novels and stories under a variety of names as well as several 1960s nonfantastic titles under his own name; there has not yet been established a reliable list of titles by McNeilly under various pseudonyms and House Names. He achieved some minor notoriety when he claimed in print to have written all the work published under the byline W Howard Baker – actually McNeilly's editor on ...
Jerome, Jerome K
(1859-1927) UK author and editor best known for humorous writing, in particular the classic Thames-centred boating travelogue Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889). He is of sf interest as editor of The Idler (which see) from its launch in February 1892, initially with the owner Robert Barr as co-editor and solo from August 1895 until his resignation in November 1897. In addition, he wrote a few ...
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 ...