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Monday 20 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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Gulliver
Lemuel Gulliver is the narrator of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships (1726; rev 1735) by Jonathan Swift, better known as Gulliver's Travels, the short-form title by which it immediately became known by its commentators and critics. It is one of the most widely recognized literary texts of the eighteenth century and has been a ...
Gilmore, Anthony
Collaborative pseudonym used in Astounding Stories of Super-Science by Harry Bates and Desmond W Hall, respectively editor and assistant editor of that magazine, for the enthusiastically received Hawk Carse series, put into book form as Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventures (November 1931-November 1932 Astounding and July 1942 Amazing; coll ...
Silvera, Adam
(1990- ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult More Happy Than Not (2015; exp 2020), explores with considerable intricacy and depth the existential cruces faced by a young man from a conservative family in a heterosexual relationship who discovers he is gay. His medical solution to this dilemma – to submit to a Memory Edit through the Leteo Institute to excise his ...
Rumfitt, Alison
(? - ) UK poet and author whose T(y)ranny (coll of linked poems 2019 chap) focuses on the imagined experience of a trans woman (see Transgender SF) in a Dystopia based (critically) on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Her first novel, Tell Me I'm Worthless (2021), is a ghost story. [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 ...