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
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 ...
Dudgeon, Robert Ellis
(1820-1904) Scottish homeopathic doctor – editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy from 1846 to 1884 – and author of the Utopian novel Colymbia (1873), published anonymously. Written in a spirit of competition with Erewhon (1872; rev 1903) by Samuel Butler, who was Dudgeon's patient, it is set on an equatorial Archipelago in the Pacific and ...
McKeone, Lee
(1937-2007) US author of the Ghoster sequence of Space Operas – Ghoster (1988), Backblast (1989) and Starfire Down (1991) – set in undemanding interstellar venues where human entrepreneurs may comically flourish. McKeone subsequently concentrated on Ties, including the Birthright sequence tied to the Role Playing Game and signed ...
Nichols, Robert [2]
(1919-2010) US poet and author of the Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai sequence describing in fictionalized terms a pacific, agricultural, myth-driven Utopia, beginning with Red Shift: An Introduction to Nghsi-Altai (1977) with Peter Schumann and ending with Exile: Book IV of Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai (1978). From the Steam Room: A Satire of Global Perspective on the Financial Ruin of New York (1993) is a ...
C, H F
Pseudonym of an unidentified UK writer (? -? ) whose Near Future sf novel, Sir John Toughbo, M P; or, the Registered Life-Pass (1903 chap), argumentatively visualizes a 1919 world distorted by labour unrest. [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 ...