SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Lungu, Simina
(? - ) Romanian author who writes both in her native language and in English (Romanian titles have not been confirmed below). Her first novel, The Last Survivors (2017), is fantasy. A Song for Rust-City (2025), which is sf, and set in a noirish Near-Future City rife with crime, features an investigator who uses her ...
Pinchin, Frank J
(1925-1990) UK research chemist and author. His first four sf novels, all as by Peter Dagmar, were not exceptional: Alien Skies (1962), Spykos 4: Strange Life-Forms on Unexplored Planets (1962; vt Spaceways 1973), Sands of Time (1963) – a fairly complex Time-Travel tale in which visitors from the future attempt to destroy a post-World War Three super- ...
Turner, C C
(1870-1952) UK journalist and author, active from before World War One, in which he served, and which he described in the nonfiction The Struggle in the Air, 1914-1918 (1919) as Major Charles C Turner; most of his early journalism and books dealt with aeronautical issues, beginning with Cantor Lectures on Aeronautics (coll 1910), which were delivered in 1909. In later years, Turner specialized in crime adventures, often for adults, ...
Renner, James
(1978- ) US film producer, journalist and author most of whose nonfiction work has focused on unsolved murders, a pattern entered into in his first novel, The Man from Primrose Lane (2012), whose protagonist's investigation into a long-ago murder implicates his own dead wife, and generates a disturbing climax in which a Near Future Dystopian America, and perhaps other worlds, are juxtaposed with ...
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 ...