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Wednesday 15 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
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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 ...
Barnes, Jonathan
(1979- ) UK author who also writes as J S Barnes; the Somnambulist sequence beginning with The Somnambulist (2007) is a complex detective thriller set in a Steampunk version of Late Victorian London, congenially evoking some of the affirming affect created by Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates (1984) and other tales. The stage magician Edward Moon and ...
Mader, Friedrich W
(1866-1945) German author, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H Rider Haggard. Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932) is a juvenile which takes its Spaceship crew to Mars and finally – one of the first sf texts to ...
Paternoster, G Sidney
(1866-1925) UK author whose Motor Pirate sequence, comprising The Motor Pirate (fixup 1903) and The Cruise of the Conquistador: Being the Further Adventures of the Motor Pirate (fixup 1905), features the exploits of the eponymous masked highwayman (and later pirate), making use of a car of an advanced Technology, and later – in episodes internally identified as being set in the Near Future ...
Glenn, Joshua
(1967- ) US editor, publisher and essayist, founder-editor of the journal Hermenaut (1992-2001), and responsible for the creation (solo or in collaboration) of several websites, including Significant Objects, Hermenaut and HiLoBrow. Through the latter site, he edited an initial iteration of the Radium Age series of reprints of sf titles – at least ten all told, most of them Scientific Romances ...
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 ...