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Monday 19 October 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 12 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Starzl, R F
(1899-1976) US journalist and author who between 1928 and 1934 had 24 stories published in the Pulp magazines, written primarily as a means of financing his family newspaper, the LeMars Globe-Post, of which he became the proprietor. Most of Starzl's stories are competently written but became increasingly formulaic, though he was especially good at creating different types of Monsters. His first story is his best remembered, "Out of ...
Ole Luk-Oie
The best-known pseudonym of India-born UK military thinker and author Ernest Dunlop Swinton (1868-1951), who served in various capacities in the UK army from 1888 until he retired in 1919 with the rank of Major-General. His first book, The Defence of Duffer's Drift: A Few Experiences in Field Defence for Detached Posts Which May Prove Useful in Our Next War (1904 chap) as by Backsight Forethought, is couched as a sequence of fantasticated dreams in which Lieutenant Forethought ...
Poyer, David C
(1949- ) US author who has published non-genre work as David Poyer, and sf variously as David C Poyer, D C Poyer and David Andreissen. The Shiloh Project (1981) is set in the Near Future of an Alternate History in which the South had won the Battle of Gettysburg 120 years before. Star Seed (1982) as David Andreissen places within a context of exceeding grimness – ...
Watson, Frederick
(1885-1935) UK publisher and author who also wrote as by Ian Ferguson and John Ferguson. He is of sf interest for The Ghost Rock; Or, White Man's Gold (1912; vt The Treasure of the Hills circa 1920s), a Lost Race tale narrated by a young man whose exceedingly vigorous inventor uncle (see Inventions) – who may have been moulded on Watson's father, John Watson (1850-1907), a notoriously if genially ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star ...