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Wednesday 22 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.
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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 ...
Stillman, Ron
Pseudonym of US author Don Bendell (1947- ), of the Tracker Military-SF series starring a USAF pilot and genius whose inventions make his blindness irrelevant; the stories are told in a maliciously exaggerated Parody of the conventions of this sort of fiction. The sequence so far comprises Tracker (1990), Green Lightning (1990), Blood Money (1991), ...
Couvreur, André
(1863-1944) French medical doctor and author who used his professional knowledge in the creation of the Caresco sequence – comprising Le Mal Nécessaire (1899; trans Brian Stableford as The Necessary Evil 2014) and Caresco surhomme; ou le Voyage en Eucrasie (1904; trans Brian Stableford as Caresco, Superman 2014) – whose protagonist, ...
Reynolds, Ted
Working name of US anaesthetist and author Theodore Andrus Reynolds (1938- ), who began publishing sf with "Just Imagine" in Beyond Fantasy Fiction for November 1953, becoming again active from 1977 and releasing about fifteen stories in the next decade or so. His first novel, The Tides of God (1989) – tenth of the third Ace Specials sequence initiated by Terry Carr and ...
Terra
Common item of sf Terminology. In sf the Latin form is that conventionally given to the name of our planet, since Earth is ambiguous, meaning both the planet itself and soil – a point frequently made when Earth is sought in E C Tubb's Dumarest sequence: "As well call a planet Dirt, or Soil!" (The irony here is that the same ambiguity exists in Latin, where terra can mean anything from soil or the ground, as 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 ...