SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 14 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 ...
Wolverton, Dave
(1957-2022) US author who also wrote as David Farland, and who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Sky Is an Open Highway" in The Leading Edge for Fall 1985. He began to enter literary contests in that year, winning a few small competitions and then the Best of the Year award in the Writers of the Future Contest for 1986, with "On My Way to Paradise", which appeared in ...
Speer, Jack
(1920-2008) US fan, attorney and author, an early member of Fandom who was active from the mid-1930s, publishing a letter in Wonder Stories for September 1934. In fandom he also used the hoax persona John A Bristol, chiefly in 1938-1939 (but see below). He published the first significant history of the fan community as an instalment of his Fanzine Full Length Articles (1938-1960s), each of whose ...
Vector
The journal of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA). There have been 281 issues from 1958 to Winter 2015-2016. / Vector has been published since the foundation of the BSFA in 1958, fairly regularly since the 1970s. E C Tubb was its first editor (#1), and it has had many editors since then, including Terry Jeeves (#2-#4, 1958-1959) and Michael ...
Ash, Brian
(1936-2010) UK scientific journalist, editor and author. His Faces of the Future: The Lessons of Science Fiction (1975) assumes that its readers might be ignorant of sf, which leads to more plot summarizing than some sf readers found useful. His Who's Who in Science Fiction (1976; rev 1977) was well received by the general press, but heavily attacked in the sf specialist press for omissions and errors; the revised edition corrected many of the inaccuracies. ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...