SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Winterson, Jeanette
(1959- ) UK author, much of whose work juggles elements out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize deeply held arguments about Gender (see also Feminism); as her work edges constantly into the allegorical it is, however, not easy to think of her as a natural author of the fantastic, though her work is too various and transgressive for her to be categorized as a ...
Watkins, William John
(1942- ) US poet, author and academic, associate professor then full professor of English at Brookdale Community College, New Jersey (now retired). For early work up to 1980 his working name was William Jon Watkins [see Checklist below for byline distinctions]. He was initially active as a poet, his first book being Five Poems (coll 1968 chap). His first sf novel, with Gene Snyder, was Ecodeath (1972), a ...
Fixup
A term first used by A E van Vogt to describe a book made up of previously published stories fitted together – usually with the addition of newly written or published cementing material – so that they read as a novel. Aware that fixups are immensely more common in Genre SF than in any other literature in the world, we borrowed the term for the 1979 edition of this encyclopedia, and continue to use it now; an example is ...
Sloley, Emma
(? - ) Australian journalist and author, in US from 2003, who is of sf interest for her first novel, Disaster's Children (2019), a very Near Future Young Adult tale set mostly in a remote rural ranch compound (see Keep) occupied by the very rich, who are planning to dodge the Climate Change catastrophe more and more ...
Bass, T J
Working name of US author Thomas J Bassler (1932-2011), who began publishing sf with "Star Seeder" in If for September 1969. He was almost exclusively associated with the Hive series that comprises his only book publications, Half Past Human (December 1969 Galaxy and November 1970 If; fixup 1971) and The Godwhale (1974), itself expanded from an earlier story, "Rorqual Maru" (January 1972 ...
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 ...