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Thursday 16 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 ...
Long, Amelia Reynolds
(1903-1978) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Twin Soul" in Weird Tales for March 1928, and who contributed "The Mechanical Man" to the two-story Science Fiction Series anthology, Mechanical Man/Thought Stealer (anth 1930 chap), the second story being by Frank Bourne. Her story "The Thought-Monster" (March 1930 Weird Tales) was much later filmed ...
Farca, Marie C
(1935- ) US author whose first sf novel, Earth (1972), is a competent adventure involving an ecologically-sound culture attempting to cope with a Ruined Earth from within a Keep; confusingly, this planet, which the protagonist Andrew Ames has discovered, is called Earth, just as is Ames's home planet. The sequel, Complex Man (1973), is set on another planet (not called Earth), ...
Shelby, Ashley
(1977- ) US journalist and author whose first novel, the nonfantastic South Pole Station (2017), is set in contemporary Antarctica. She is of sf interest for Muri (2019 chap), a novella which reconfigures Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (October-December 1855 Putnam's Monthly Magazine). "Muri" is the leader's name in A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres ...
Harkins, Peter J
(1916-2006) US author who collaborated with Harold Leland Goodwin on the first three volumes of the Invention-rich Rick Brant Science-Adventure sequence for teenage readers: The Rocket's Shadow (1947), The Lost City (1947) and Sea Gold (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947), all published under Goodwin's usual pseudonym John Blaine (whom see for details and subsequent titles). Peter J ...
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 ...