SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 14 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Kingston, W H G
(1814-1880) UK author, almost solely for boys from 1850, more than 100 of his novels being juveniles, many of which expose his evangelical convictions; of these two are sf interest: Mark Seaworth: A Tale of the Indian Ocean (1852), a Lost Race tale; and At the South Pole: Or, the Adventures of Richard Pengelley, Mariner (1870), where the climate is unexpected. From 1853 until his death he was married to Agnes Kinloch ...
Burnside, John
(1955-2024) Scottish poet, journalist and author, active from the mid-1980s. The protagonist of his first novel, The Dumb House (1997), narrates the tale in a voice occasionally evocative of the first-person protagonist of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory (1984); with Mad-Scientist intensity, he describes his attempt to raise his own children entirely deprived of any external access to language (see ...
Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya
(1992- ) Sri Lankan author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Dreadnaught" in The Expanding Universe: Volume Three (anth 2017) edited by Craig Martelle. His first novel, the Near Future Numbercaste (2017 ebook), embroils its protagonist in a vast information-resource firm called NumberCorp whose goal – slightly anticipating the third season of Westworld ...
Panshin, Alexei
Working name of US author Alexis Adams Panshin (1940-2022), married to Cory Panshin until his death; initially most active in sf Fandom, in this role doing considerable writing and editing, for which he won a Hugo for best fan writer in 1967. His first professional sale was the non-sf "A Piece of Pie" (November 1960 Seventeen); he began publishing fiction of genre interest with "Down to the Worlds 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 ...