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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 ...
D'Amato, Brian
(1962- ) US sculptor, painter and author, son of Barbara D'Amato (1938- ) and Anthony D'Amato (1937-2018), both writers; his essay on L Frank Baum's Oz, "The Wooden Gargoyles: Evil in Oz" – which was published as an afterword to his mother's mystery novel, Hard Road: A Cat Marsala Mystery (2001) – sharply but sympathetically examines some of the darker implications of Baum's work. ...
Landis, Arthur H
(1917-1986) US author and editor. While editing for Dealer's Voice, a motorcycle magazine, Landis convinced his publisher to begin a new fantasy magazine, Coven 13, which he edited for four issues September 1969-March 1970 before the title passed to William L Crawford. He published there a four-part serial as by James R Keaveny, which became A World Called Camelot (September 1969-March 1970 ...
Tidyman, Ernest
(1928-1984) US journalist, author and screenwriter, author of the Shaft series of books about a Black detective, and of scripts for the Shaft movies, The French Connection (1971) and the supernatural Western High Plains Drifter (1973), among others. His sf novel, Absolute Zero (1971), is a Near-Future thriller whose protagonist becomes involved in Cryonics in an attempt to ...
Draulans, Dirk
(1956- ) Belgian biologist and author whose sf novel, De rode koningin: roman over de oorlog tussen man en vrouw (1994; trans Sam Garrett as The Red Queen: A Novel of the War Between the Sexes 1998), presents a Dystopian view of Genetic Engineering, as a ferocious woman (unusual among her ineffective, passive, technologically incompetent kind) hunts down the last fertile ...
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 ...