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Tuesday 14 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 ...
Taylor, D J
(1960- ) UK literary critic, biographer and author whose novels have normally not ventured into the fantastic; of sf interest, however, is The Windsor Faction (2013), an Alternate History tale set at the end of the 1930s in Britain, with Edward VIII (who in the real world abdicated in 1936) still on the throne (see Jonbar Point). Though affected by a demureness typical of ...
Planetary Romance
Any sf tale whose primary venue (excluding contemporary or Near-Future versions of Earth) is a planet, and whose plot turns to a significant degree upon the nature of that venue, can be described as a planetary romance. For the term to apply properly, however, it is not enough that a tale simply be set on a world: James Blish's A Case of Conscience (September 1953 If; exp 1958), for instance, ...
Lynn, Elizabeth A
(1946- ) US author who began to publish work of sf interest with "We All Have to Go" in the crime fiction anthology Tricks and Treats (anth 1976) edited by Joe Gores and Bill Pronzini. This was assembled with other early work in The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories (coll 1981), whose contents were selected for Tales from a Vanished Country (coll 1990), which also includes ...
Summerville, Jenny
(? - ) Australian author, the young protagonists of whose Young Adult sf novel, Shields of Trell (1984), play with the controls of their spacebus, and find it is a Starship capable of intergalactic travel. Various perils including a Black Hole are duly encountered. [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 ...