SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Robinsonade
Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) provides the name and is the central model for the robinsonade, which may be defined as the romance of solitary survival in such inimical (though ultimately compliant) terrains as desert Islands (or planets), seen as a success-story. Earlier tales do exist (in The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction [1941], Philip Babcock ...
Jay, Victor
Pseudonym of Victor J Banis (1937-2019), who is perhaps best known for transgressive 1960s novels like The Affairs of Gloria (1964), which was unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity by officials in Sioux City, Iowa, and for The Man from C.A.M.P. sequence of gay detective novels. Early pseudonyms include Jay Vickery, under which he wrote one sf novel, Man Into Boy (1968), and the House Name J X ...
Artemis 81
Made-for-tv film (1981). BBC TV. Directed by Alastair Reid. Written by David Rudkin. Cast includes Hywel Bennett, Roland Curram, Dan O'Herlihy, Ian Redford, Dinah Stabb, Sting and Margaret Whiting. 181 minutes. Colour. / On another planet, the Manichean Alien angels Asrael (Curram) and Helith (Sting) vie over the fate of the human race. Evil Asrael travels to Earth and forces the cursed organist Albrecht von Drachenfels (O'Herlihy) to distribute pieces of a ...
Pease, Tom
(? - ) US author of Pudoria (1961), a Near Future Utopia, with some authoritarian implications: financial transactions are abhorred; money itself cannot be mentioned; free love (see Sex) is openly practised. [JC]
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 ...