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Monday 20 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 ...
Sci Fi
Pronounced "si fi" or sometimes "sky fi"; often hyphenated. An abbreviation for "science fiction" whose first recorded use was in 1954, when the term "hi-fi" (high-fidelity) was becoming popular in the context of audio equipment. The wordplay-loving Forrest J Ackerman claimed to have invented the term and later promoted it eagerly in his Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-1983). However, Ackerman's first known ...
Collier, John
(1901-1980) UK author, poet and short-story author who spent much of his career, after about 1935, in the USA writing filmscripts. He was known mainly for his sophisticated though sometimes rather precious short stories, generally featuring the kind of acerbic snap ending often found in the disillusioned, wary kind of Slick Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] introduced by Saki, who ...
Kirmess, C H
Pseudonym of Australian newspaperman and author Frank Fox (1874-1960), in the UK from about 1909; in his Future War tale, The Australian Crisis (October 1908-August 1909 Lone Hand as "The Commonwealth Crisis"; 1909), an effeminate Near Future Australia is subject to Invasion by Asians (see Yellow Peril). Fox was knighted in 1926. [JC]
Pax Aeronautica
The sense that air Transportation must dramatically change the tactics and strategy of Future War was articulated in the eighteenth century by Samuel Johnson in his Proto SF Rasselas (1759): / Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas, could afford any security ... Even this valley, the retreat of ...
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 ...