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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.
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 ...
Pines, Ned L
(1905-1990) US magazine and book publisher who in 1931 founded a group of magazines with Thrilling in the title: Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Love, etc. These became part of the Pines Publications group (which Pines served as president 1929-1961), whose associated companies included Standard Comics, Standard Magazines, Beacon Magazines and Better Publications. In 1936 Pines bought Gernsback's Wonder Stories and retitled it ...
Volney, M
(1757-1820) French philosopher, traveller and author; he adopted the name Volney, a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney (a French commune), which became his title. After initial travels to the Middle East, and the publication of books describing his responses, he deepened his contemplation of the world in Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791; trans anon as ...
Hurwitz, Gregg Andrew
(1973- ) US Comics writer for DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and author of Technothrillers with a Horror cast, whose first novels were published under his full name, though he more recently writes as Gregg Hurwitz, including his main series, the borderline-sf Orphan X sequence beginning with Orphan X ...
Barclay James Harvest
UK prog-rock band formed in Oldham in 1966 by guitarist John Lees (1947- ), bassist Les Holroyd (1948- ), keyboard player Stuart "Woolly" Wolstenholme (1947-2010) and percussionist Mel Pritchard (1948-2004). The band's folk-influenced music, informed by a rather egregious agrarian Pastoralism, occasionally reverted to a Dystopian sf. Their song "Negative Earth" (in ...
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 ...