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
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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 ...
Leonard, Lawrence
(1923-2001) UK cellist, conductor, composer and author whose Young Adult tale, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980), is set primarily Underground beneath London, where an ancient race, distinguishable from surface humans mostly by their small stature (see Great and Small), has flourished for many centuries by carefully imitating life on the surface. From ...
Servello, Joe
(1932- ) American artist, apparently a lifelong resident of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Online biographies report generally that Servello has worked as an actor, art and drama teacher, and art director for television, but no specific information is provided. As a commercial artist, Servello is best known as an illustrator of children's books; his most prominent assignments were the covers and interior art for several juvenile novels by William ...
Memory Edit
Term used in this encyclopedia for selective Amnesia and/or implantation of false memories, deliberately inflicted upon its victim – though sometimes self-inflicted. Early Proto SF examples include Dr Heidenhoff's Process (1880) by Edward Bellamy and "The Memory Clearing House" (July 1892 Idler) by Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) – the latter featuring ...
Bird, William Henry Fleming
(1896-1971) UK art lecturer and author, in active service during World War One, who published some magazine sf in the 1950s under his own name, and also as John Toucan and John Eagle. His debut story was "War Potential" (October 1952 Tales of Tomorrow) as by John Toucan, and the first under his own name was "Critical Age" (1953 Futuristic Science Stories #12). Later work was ...
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 ...