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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
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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 ...
Cavallaro, Brittany
(1986- ) US poet and author whose Girl-King (coll of linked poems 2015 chap) effectively comprises a book-length narrative whose young female subjects interweave their life-stories, a mosaic of careers in living that often engages in the fantastic; Unhistorical (coll 2019 chap) contains an apocryphal narrative featuring Sherlock Holmes and Watson in Scotland. Her Young Adult ...
Whitmore, Charles
(1945- ) US author whose Winter's Daughter: The Saying of Signe Ragnhilds-Datter (1984) is set in the Near Future at some point after a nuclear World War Three has failed to end civilization entirely; various strategies for survival are tested in Africa, America and (it is from here that the protagonist speaks) Norway. [JC]
Turk, H C
(1958- ) US photographer, painter and author who began publishing sf with the comic adventure Ether Ore (1987), an Alternate History tale where the world has been transformed by the eponymous Power Source, which makes space travel cheap, and where a female "Hitler" is a force for peace. The exceedingly ambitious Black Body (1989) presents, in terms readable as both sf and ...
Tearne, Roma
(1954- ) Sri Lankan-born painter and author, in UK from 1964; most of her fiction is nonfantastic, her first two novels, Mosquito (2007) and Bone China (2008) in particular focusing on the land of her birth. The sense of loss and irretrievable distance that mark these tales also governs, from a different line of sight, her sf novel The White City (2017), set in a Near Future ...
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 ...