SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Solomon, Rivers
(1988- ) US author, in UK from 2018, whose first novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), is set in a Generation Starship many years into its journey. The SF Megatext provides a generous range of likelihoods for this setting to illuminate, some of which Solomon duly invokes: the ritualized maintenance procedures designed to keep the ship and its inhabitants in order; the hierarchized ...
Cowboy Bebop
Japanese animated tv series (1998-1999). Sunrise, Bandai Visual. Directed by Shinichirō Watanabe. Written by Keiko Nobumoto and others. Voice cast includes Megumi Hayashibara, Unshō Ishizuka and Kōichi Yamadera. 26 episodes of 25 minutes. Colour. / In the year 2071, the Solar system is home to a colourful melting-pot (but largely Chinese) diaspora, made possible by localized Hyperspace gateways. Earth, however, ...
Lift, De
Film (1983; vt The Lift). Sigma Films. Directed by Dick Maas. Written by Mass; music by Maas. Cast includes Huub Stapel and Willeke Van Ammelrooy. 99 minutes. Colour. / This neat Dutch Horror film with an sf rationale, dubbed atrociously into English, tells of a homicidal lift (elevator) in a high-rise office building. The lift is controlled by an organic, living Computer (biochip), manufactured in Japan, which ...
Weston, George
(1880-1965) UK author whose family emigrated to the USA in 1888/1890; active in the magazines from the publication of "Alicia and Bob the Canary" (October 1904 Everybody's Magazine) or earlier until 1945. He is best known for His First Million Women (1934; vt Comet "Z" 1934), an early version of the sf topos where sterility (see Disaster) affects all but one man – an Adam and Eve-associated ...
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 ...