SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
X-Men
US Comic-book series, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for Marvel Comics in 1963. Kirby drew the first 11 issues and Lee wrote the first 19. Not as immediately successful as Marvel's other properties, it had an initial 66-issue run, and then ran reprints until #93 (1974). A new team of X-Men was introduced in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (cover dated May 1975, released in ...
Beauman, Ned
(1985- ) UK screenwriter and author whose first novel, Boxer, Beetle (2010), is an exuberantly gonzo demonstration of nonfantastic ludic fiction (see Johan Huizinga), with rule-governed structural plays and clashes of narrative modes, with a focus on 1930s Berlin, Eugenics, modernist music, entomology and boxing. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident (2012), introduces sf ...
Generation Starships
For writers unwilling to power their Starships with Faster-than-Light drives or to make use of a Relativistic time contraction, there is a real problem in sending ships between the stars: the length of the voyage, which would normally span many human lifetimes. The usual answers are to put the crew into Suspended Animation, as in James ...
Morris, M Marlow
(1867-? ) US author of a Utopia, No Borderland (1938) with Laura B Speer, whose protagonists, lost in the jungle, are rescued by the voice of a woman, which leads them Underground to a Lost World inhabited by the survivors of Atlantis, who have created a clement agrarian society. The protagonists realize they are reincarnations of ancients, ...
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 (1966-1967), and later in ...