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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.
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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 ...
Pattee, Emma
(? - ) US journalist and author, who identifies as a "climate journalist", though her first novel Tilt (2025), which is set in the very Near Future, deals only indirectly with her central pursuits. The great, long-expected Pacific Rim earthquake which shatters Portland, Oregon in this tale is not occasioned by Climate Change, though it of course causes radical alterations in ...
Lehr, Paul
(1930-1998) American artist. Lehr studied illustration at the prestigious Pratt Institute, where he worked under Stanley Meltzoff, an early influence on his art. His first sf cover – for the American edition of Jeffery Lloyd Castle's Satellite E One (1954) – is a realistic depiction of the construction of an unusually-shaped Space Station, and similar ...
O'Connell, Charles C
(? - ) Irish author in whose first novel, The Vanishing Island (1957; vt The Vanishing Island: An Irish Entertainment 1958), the mysterious Island of Innishios experiences First Contact through the arrival in a UFO-like Spaceship of an attractive Alien, who introduces the inhabitants ...
Billett, Mabel Broughton
(1892-1964) Canadian author, in USA from 1936; of her four detective novels, one is of some sf interest. In The Robot Detective (1932), an immobile Robot, fed information through punch-cards (and better perhaps described as a primitive Computer), discusses a case with his/its human operator, who then goes out into the British Columbia landscape to capture the villain. Her fourth novel, "The Smooth Silence" (1936 ...
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 ...