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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 ...
Marvelman
UK reprints of the US character Captain Marvel published by L Miller were successful enough to warrant continued independent publication under a new name after the original character was deemed a copy of Superman and the courts forbade any further publication. The character was revised and changed just enough to avoid copyright issues, and re-dubbed Marvelman (346 issues, 1954-1963) in the process. Drawn by Mick ...
Mechanical Man, The
Italian film (1921). Original title L'Uomo Meccanico. Milano Film. Directed and written by André Deed. Cast includes André Deed, Valentina Frascaroli, Mathilde Lambert and Gabriel Moreau. 60-80 minutes. Black and white (but with colour tinting). About 26 minutes of this movie survive: it had long been considered lost, until parts of the Portuguese version were discovered in Brazil, albeit in poor condition. / When a criminal gang learn a ...
Johnston, Paul
(1957- ) Scottish author, partially resident in Greece, whose noirish Quint Dalrymple sequence – comprising Body Politic (1997), The Bone Yard (1998), Water of Death (1999), The Blood Tree (2000), The House of Dust (2001), Heads or Hearts (2015), Skeleton Blues (2016) and Impolitic Corpses (2019) – is a series of detections set in the ...
Wolf, Mari
(1926- ) US fan (see Fandom), technician in the rocket industry, and author, married to Rog Phillips 1950-1955; her only novel, The Golden Frame (1961), is nonfantastic. She began publishing work of genre interest with Robots of the World! Arise! (July 1952 If; 2010 ebook); it is not established if her first use of the word Droid, 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 ...