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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 ...
Shippey, Tom
Working name of Indian-born academic and editor Thomas A Shippey (1943- ), in the UK from childhood; Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds 1979-1993; held the Walter J Ong Chair of Humanities at St Louis University 1993-2008. In essays and reviews, which he has been publishing since the mid-1970s, he takes a clear-headed orthodox view of the central figures of sf and fantasy; ...
Rutledge, Maryse
Working name of US author Marie Rutledge Gibson Hale (1884-? ), active from around 1910; in her sf novel, The Silver Peril (1931), a Russian super-criminal attempts to dominate the world by using his super-helicopter (see Airships) to enable him to decimate the population of Bucharest with his Death Ray. In the end, hampered by megalomania, the Villain blows himself up along ...
Vopěnka, Martin
(1963- ) Czech publisher and author, active from about 1989, whose Pátý Rozmeř (2009; trans Hana Sklenkova as The Fifth Dimension 2015) is an example of Fantastika whose incorporation of sf elements achieves a bleakly deliberated abstractness that removes the text very far from Genre SF, or indeed from the tale of political/cultural ...
World War Three
Following the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs which ended World War Two, a third world War involving nuclear Holocaust became the recurring nightmare of twentieth-century sf throughout the Cold War decades and even beyond. Often it was tacitly assumed that a third world war would constitute the final instalment of a worldwide state of conflict that began in 1914 and whose ...
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 ...