SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
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 ...
Space School
UK tv serial (1956). Produced by Kevin Sheldon. Written by Gordon Ford. Cast includes David Drummond, Matthew Lane, Donald McCorkindale, John Stuart and Julie Webb. Four 25-minute episodes. Black and white. / The producer of this Children's SF serial was also behind such earlier British sf serials as The Lost Planet (1954). In Space School, a group of children live in an artificial satellite ...
Mentor, Lillian Frances
(? -? ) US author of sf interest for The Day of Resis (1897), a Lost Race tale set in Africa, where explorers, guided by a mysterious manuscript, discover a society of Ancient Egyptians. [JC]
Davis, Hank
(1944- ) US author and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Squatter's Rights" in If for March 1968. Ten more short stories followed at intervals until 2022, with another long announced for the never-published full version of Harlan Ellison's «The Last Dangerous Visions»; of the published tales, perhaps the most notable was "To Plant a Seed" in Orbit 11 (anth 1972) ...
Powers, Richard
(1957- ) US author of novels whose novels subject the contemporary world to scathing but abstract scrutiny; he is rarely misdescribed as a mimetic realist, though just as rarely is he called an sf writer. His first novel, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985), focuses a meditation on the apocalyptic nature of World War One through its protagonist's obsession with the famous photograph (the book is titled after it) by ...
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 ...