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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 ...
Coulton, Jonathan
(1970- ) US singer-songwriter, whose prolific early work in 2005-2006 was particularly notable for its use of sf tropes in wistfully comic first-person songs about geek masculinity, especially in the EP Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow (2005). In "Better" the singer's girlfriend is slowly turning into a Cyborg; in "The Future Soon" a teenager fantasizes about a career as a robotically augmented ...
Infodump
An item of sf Terminology commonly used to designate chunks of technical discourse inserted into fictional texts, usually texts described as Hard SF, which are based (or claim to be based) on non-fantasized understandings of Technology and science. It is therefore often safe to assume that the infodump itself, certainly in the hard sf context, is a condensation of non-fantasized knowledge, and that it is ...
Craine, E J
(1881-? ) US bookkeeper and author of many Young Adult titles in the 1920s and 1930s, some of which rationalize supernatural elements; the only titles with genuine fantasy content are written for younger readers. She is of sf interest primarily for her Airplane Boys sequence (see Airplane Boys), which was also published – simultaneously or soon after – as the Flying Buddies sequence, or ...
McConnell, James V
(1925-1990) US biologist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Life Sentence" in Galaxy Science Fiction for January 1953, and who in 1959 founded a science magazine-cum-Fanzine, The Worm Runner's Digest, in which alongside scientific papers (in particular on planarian worms, his speciality) he published spoofs and Satires. Many of these are assembled as ...
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 ...