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Saturday 8 November 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.
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Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Marlow, John Robert
(? - ) US author of Nano (2004), a Technothriller set in a Near Future where a Nanotechnology breakthrough is opposed by the American government, which leashes its own "nannites" against its presumed enemies; unfortunately, these nano-Weapons have not been programmed to stop; the world is, therefore, threatened. ...
Drake, David A
(1945-2023) US lawyer, publisher and author who served in the US Army in Vietnam 1969-1971 and then as the Assistant Town Attorney in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1972-1980, becoming a full-time writer in 1981, although his first story, the H P Lovecraft pastiche "Denkirch", had appeared much earlier, in Travellers by Night (anth 1967) edited by August W Derleth. The wide success of his various ...
Millar, Ali
(1980- ) Scottish author, whose first book, The Last Days (2022), which is nonfiction, describes her upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness, and her apostasy (surprisingly late) as a married woman. She is of sf interest for her first novel, the Near Future Ava Anna Ada (2024), each of these palindromes beginning with the letter A. Britain is beset not only by exponential ...
Palmer, Jessica
(1953- ) US journalist and author of two fantasy series – Dark Lullaby and Renegade World, see Checklist for titles – and the Space Opera Factor sequence, comprising Random Factor (1994), Human Factor (1996) and Random Factor (1997), about a cruel war fought in interstellar space by opposing forces of Clones governed by a central ...
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 ...