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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 ...
Vess, Charles
(1951- ) American artist. After receiving a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973, Vess briefly worked in animation before moving to New York City in 1977 to do illustrations for National Lampoon, Heavy Metal, Klutz Press, and other clients. Yet he displayed a natural talent for illustrating works of Fantasy by producing a number of paintings for a 1977 edition of J R R ...
Canada
The first serious Canadian sf work was James de Mille's posthumously published A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). In this Utopian satire, set in a Lost World, Western values are inverted (criminals are regarded as diseased, the ill are imprisoned, dying is deemed more desirable than living). Successors of De Mille were Grant Allen and ...
White, Alan
(1924-2003) UK author, almost exclusively of thrillers, often in a war setting, his best known novel probably being A Long Day's Dying (1962); his several pseudonyms, which include James Fraser, Alec Haigh, Joe Balham and others, were used only for nonfantastic works. Of sf interest is Black Alert (1985), a Near Future Technothriller in which a renegade soldier, who has gained control of a military ...
Pei, Mario
(1901-1978) Italian-born linguist, translator and author, in US from 1908, best known for such popularizing texts as The Story of Language (1949). His political conservatism shapes The Sparrows of Paris (1958), where foreign villains – at least one having been exposed to Communism in his formative years – transform themselves into Werewolves and other creatures through the use of an ancient Drug in ...
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 ...