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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 ...
Berger, Thomas
(1924-2014) US author active from around 1951, and who began to publish work of genre interest with "Professor Hyde" in Playboy for December 1961. Though much of his work is fantastic, he remained best known for novels perceived as nongeneric, like the meta-Western epic Little Big Man (1964), which combines farce and Fabulation, with the eponymous Little Big Man, who is 111, narrating his tale with supernatural vigour. ...
Buckle, Richard
(1916-2001) UK music critic who specialized in ballet, and author of a fantasticated Utopia, John Innocent at Oxford: A Fantasy (1939), which depicts a late-twentieth-century Oxford (and hence Britain) as though Max Beerbohm or Ronald Firbank had dreamed it – extravagant, witty, class-obsessed, boneless – all hilariously rendered. It may well be the last "irresponsible" pastoral utopia published before ...
Jeter, K W
(1950- ) US author of importance as an author of horror novels, the highly charged claustrophobia of his style fitting the essential affect of that genre rather better than it does sf. His early work, generally conceived in sf terms, gives off an air of hectic congestion which sometimes interferes with the presentation of ideas, with the cognitively unencumbered articulation of some barrier through which the story (and its protagonists) penetrate; for him, as for most ...
McGrath, Thomas
(1916-1990) US poet and author of The Gates of Ivory, the Gates of Horn (1957), a Dystopian vision of a future America controlled by Machines. The tale is clearly influenced by – and a response to – his treatment in 1953 as an unfriendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which caused his dismissal from the Los Angeles State College. [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 ...