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 ...
Webb, Robert
(1972- ) UK comedian, actor, screenwriter and author, best known for Television work in various iterations of the double act Mitchell and Webb, and as actor in many tv comedies and dramas. How Not to Be a Boy (2017) is a memoir. Webb is of sf interest for his first novel, Come Again (2020), whose protagonist, the widow of a man who has died suddenly in his forties, finds herself, by unexplained ...
Isometric
Term used to describe a form of perspective projection sometimes used in Videogames, particularly in those intended for older hardware, for which it could be technically advantageous. Some mathematical complexities are involved, but in essence an isometric view is one in which the lines of perspective are not linear, as in post-Renaissance European art, but parallel, as in classical Chinese scrolls. Thus objects appear in three dimensions but do not diminish with ...
Unknown
US magazine, 39 issues, March 1939 to October 1943, published by Street & Smith, edited by John W Campbell Jr; pulp-size March 1939 to August 1941, letter-size October 1941 to April 1943, then back to pulp-size to October 1943; monthly March 1939 to December 1940, then bimonthly. / The fantasy companion to Astounding Science-Fiction, Unknown was one of the most sophisticated of ...
Shores, Louis
(1904-1981) US librarian and author born Louis Steinberg, who changed his name to Shores in 1926; most of his published work was in library science. Of some sf interest is Looking Forward (1972), a lightly-fictionalized Future History in which America goes through a time of troubles, emerging triumphant during the 1990s. [JC]
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 ...