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Tuesday 14 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
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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 ...
Craigie, David
Pseudonym for her written work of theatre costume designer, illustrator and author Dorothy Glover (1901-1971), partner of Graham Greene between 1939 and 1948. As Dorothy Craigie, she wrote numerous stories for younger children, from Summersalts Circus (1947) to Nicky and Nigger Join the Circus (1960); and illustrated children's books, including the four in the genre by Greene, with whom she wrote ...
Harryhausen, Ray
(1920-2013) US special-effects supervisor, long based in the UK, associated with many sf and fantasy films and the pioneering use of stop-motion animation. As a boy his main interests were sculpture and palaeontology. The desire to see his own clay figures move on the screen, aroused by King Kong (1933), stimulated his interest in photography and special effects. While Willis H O'Brien, who had animated King Kong, was ...
Dorfman, Ariel
(1942- ) Argentinian-born academic, playwright, journalist and author, in Chile from early childhood, alternatingly in the US from the late 1960s; active from the late 1960s. His work as a writer has been intimately engaged with the fate of Chile from the election of Salvador Allende (1908-1973) in 1970, through his death after an America-inspired coup in 1973, and through the tumultuous years since. His work in general is nonfantastic, though the main protagonist of ...
Meyer, John J
(1873-1948) US author of several loosely linked apostrophic picaresques. They break down into two rough series. The Cerebroscope sequence – comprising 20,000 Trails Under the Universe with the Cerebroscope [for full subtitles throughout see Checklist] (1917) and The Deer-Smellers of Haunted Mountain (1921) – features a device, the cerebroscope, capable of Communications with the dead, of use when the protagonist ...
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 ...