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Thursday 16 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 ...
Kennedy, R A
(? -? ) UK author whose first, nonfiction work is Space and Spirit: A Commentary Upon the Work of Sir Oliver Lodge Entitled "Life and Matter" (1909). Much of the speculative content of this essay is carried over into his sf novel, The Triuneverse: A Scientific Romance (1912) as by "The Author of Space and Spirit". This is devoted mostly to conversations on Cosmology conducted sometime in the future, in ...
Al-Khalili, Jim
Working name of Iraqi-born broadcaster, physicist, academic and author Jameel Sadik Al-Khalili (1962- ), in the UK from 1979; several of his nonfiction publications, beginning with Black Holes, Wormholes and Time Machines (1999), have been addressed to the intelligent general reader. He is of sf interest for his first novel, Sunfall (2019), describes a Near Future Disaster perhaps ...
Bedford, Jacey
(? - ) UK author, folk singer and folk-song tour organizer who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Jewel of Locaria" in Warrior Princesses (anth 1998) edited by Martin H Greenberg and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Her first novel, Empire of Dust (2014), opens the Psi-Tech Space Opera trilogy ...
Masters, Anthony
(1940-2003) UK educator and author, active from about 1964; he was a prolific author of biographies; his eleven novels for adults are nonfantastic. Relatively early in his career, writing as Richard Tate, he published some deliberately exorbitant shockers, of which The Dead Travel Fast (1971) is of interest for its transgressive invasion of Dracula territory via a series of vampirish murders on a film set. Red Ice (1986) with Nicholas Barker is a ...
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 ...