SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
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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 ...
Van Tuyl, Zaara
(1901-? ) US grade school teacher until 1955, student of the occult and author, educated at Fresno State College, Fresno, California. Her sf novel is Skyways for Doorian (1967). [DRL/JC]
Gods and Demons
The word "God" (or "Gods") is one of the commonest of all nouns in sf story and novel titles. Although this frequency is partly fuelled by the interest in Religion that has characterized sf from its earliest days, we must seek further to explain the sheer scale of the phenomenon. / The sf writer is a creator of imaginary worlds; in that sense his activity is godlike. It is, then, natural that he or she should especially enjoy fantasies (some might say delusions ...
Dyer, George
(1903-1978) US academic, political historian – instructor in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University – and author of two books of somewhat marginal sf interest. A Storm Is Rising (1934) is about a Near-Future conspiracy to overthrow the American government; in The Long Death: A Catalyst Club Murder Mystery (1937), a proto-nuclear physicist is murdered (by long distance X- ...
Gauld, Tom
(1976- ) Scottish illustrator, cartoonist and author, active since the beginning of the twenty-first century; he is perhaps best known for a weekly strip cartoon published in the Guardian, a first representative assembly of this material being You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (graph coll 2013); Baking With Kafka (graph coll 2017) also contains material from other sources, often directly using sf imagery and themes; Goliath ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...