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Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
Wilson, Gahan
(1930-2019) American artist and author, best known for his work outside the genre as a cartoonist, his career beginning in the mid-1940s; associated mainly for many decades with such Slick magazines as Playboy (from 1957) and The New Yorker (from 1980). The bizarre and often macabre sense of Humour he displayed in his innumerable cartoons, though influenced by such precursors as Charles ...
Wild Palms
US tv miniseries (1993). American Broadcasting Company/Greengrass Enterprises/Ixtlan. Created and written by Bruce Wagner. Executive producers Wagner and Oliver Stone. Six hours. The first two-hour episode "Everything Must Go" directed by Peter Hewitt; the next one-hour episode "The Floating World" directed by Keith Gordon; the next one-hour episode "Rising Sons" directed by Kathryn Bigelow; the next one-hour episode "Hungry Ghosts" directed by Keith ...
Pier, Arthur Stanwood
(1874-1966) US author, best-known for the nonfantastic St Timothy's series of tales set at a boys' school; of sf interest God's Secret (1935), a Near Future tale dealing with the consequences of the discovery of an Immortality serum. [JC]
Ingrey, Derek
(1929-1989) UK scriptwriter for television and film and author whose Post-Holocaust sf novel, Pig on a Lead (1963), describes the dead-end life of the last surviving humans in the UK – two men, who soon kill each other, and a boy Last Man figure, who survives in the company of a young Eve-figure (see Adam and Eve) and the eponymous pig. Told in a remarkable pot pourri of styles, ...
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 ...