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Saturday 18 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 ...
Yasugi Masayoshi
(1972-2021) Japanese author whose work was suffused with a gentle melancholy and a concentration on damaged people – a group of which he may have tragically considered himself to be a member. Graduating from the Law and Economics Department of Kyūshū International University, he worked part-time in publishing while writing the early fictions that made his name. He was also the editor of SF Prologue Wave, an online magazine run by volunteer ...
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Working name of French poet, playwright and author Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838-1889); he was an extremely impoverished member of a minor branch of the Villiers de L'Isle-Adam family, long prominent in Brittany. Active as a poet from about 1859, even his first work, Premières poésies (coll 1859 chap), expressing the extremist Decadence that governed his contrarian stance as regards his ...
Stith, John E
(1947- ) US software engineering manager and author who began to publish sf with "Early Winter" in Fantastic for July 1979. His first novel, Scapescope (1984) – which is Hard SF like all his work – uses his work experience at the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain Complex to extrapolate on the nature of a defense complex in that location two centuries hence. Memory Blank (1986) places a ...
Sloan, Robin
(1979- ) US author whose Penumbra sequence beginning with Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (short version 2009 Escape Pod EP215; 2012) is set mainly in and around the eponymous very Near Future (dating from 2009) San Francisco bookshop (see California), and sf and fantasy turns (see Equipoise) to explore the nature of the physical book, its cultural ...
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 ...