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Wednesday 15 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Tennant, Emma
(1937-2017) UK editor and author whose first acknowledged novel – her actual first, The Colour of Rain (1964) as by Catherine Aydy, was not sf – is The Time of the Crack (short version as "The Crack" in New Worlds 5, anth 1973, ed Michael Moorcock; exp 1973; vt The Crack 1978), an sf novel about an inexplicable faultline – described in terms that imply a gamut of meanings, from ...
Gilmour, William
(? - ) US author who has specialized in pastiches of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, including Lost on Jupiter (1962 chap), Tarzan and the Lightning Man (1963 chap) (see Tarzan) and Back to the Earth's Core (1971). More recently, in The Undying Land (1985), he competently pastiched the style of 1920s fantastic adventure- ...
Richards, Justin
(1961- ) UK author, almost exclusively of Ties for the Doctor Who universe, and of other fiction, some of sf interest, for the Young Adult market. The Doctor Who books begin with Doctor Who: The New Adventures: Theatre of War (1994). Richards is fast and competent. Of his independent work, the Invisible Detective sequence, beginning with ...
Brant, John Ira
(1872-1959) US inventor and author whose The New Regime: A. D. 2202 (1909) bases its vision of an international Utopia on the work of Edward Bellamy. Unusually, the "visitor" to this utopia is not a Sleeper Awakes figure but a contemporary man who has given himself Amnesia through Drug use, and must be reintroduced to his happy ...
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 ...