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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.
Site updated on 20 April 2026
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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 ...
Perception
The ways in which we become aware of and receive information about the outside world, mainly through the senses, are together called perception. Philosophers are deeply divided as to whether our perceptions of the outside world correspond to an actual reality, or whether they are merely hypotheses, intellectual constructs, which may give us an unreliable or partial picture of external reality, or whether, indeed, outside reality is itself a mental construct. / Perception is and always has ...
Schiff, Stuart David
(1946- ) US army dentist and editor best known in sf/fantasy circles for editing Whispers (which see), a Semiprozine of some note that ran from 1973 to 1987 and spun off the Whispers Anthology series beginning with Whispers: An Anthology of Fantasy and Horror (anth 1977) [see Checklist below]. Schiff has also edited other anthologies such as the ...
Zola, Émile
(1840-1902) French author whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence of Naturalist novels (1871-1893) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E A Vizetelly 1884), for which he was once notorious. Zola is of sf interest for Vérité (1903 2vols; trans E A Vizetelly as Truth 1903), the third instalment of his unfinished Les Quatre Évangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet, which was planned to espouse a kind of ...
Makeruna! Makendō
Japanese animated OVA (1995; vt Don't Lose, Makendo). OLM, Inc. Directed by Kazuya Murata. Written by Yasuhiro Komatsuzaki. Voice cast includes Shigeru Chiba, Ryo Horikawa, Mika Kanai, Yasuhiro Komatsuzaki, Hikaru Midorikawa, Kotono Mitsuishi and Yuko Nagashima. 23 minutes. Colour. / After being kidnapped, Kaimyouji Eizan (Komatsuzaki) wakes in the laboratory of Dr Mud (Chiba), a green-skinned, pink-haired ...
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 ...