SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Babcock, George
(1863-1942) US clothier, real estate agent, and author whose sole work of sf interest is Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown (1922), a not entirely competent but decidedly complicated tale in which occult and sf modes intermingle. A pilot named Bacon flies too high, and is dashed to Earth by Azrael, only to find that, in something like his astral body, and accompanied by his dark Doppelganger, he has begun a ...
Olson, John B
(? - ) US author of the Oxygen sequence of sf novels with Randall Ingermanson, who see for details. [JC]
Amazing Spider-Man, The
1. US tv series (1977-1979). Charles Fries Productions for CBS-TV. Character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics, debuting in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) and appearing in his own title The Amazing Spider-Man from March 1963. Produced by Robert Jones, Lionel E Siegel, Edward Montagne. Directors included Cliff Bole, Michael Caffey, Don MacDougall. ...
Lawrence, James Cooper
(1890-1932) US industrialist and author of The Year of Regeneration: An Improbable Fiction (1932), in which a man living in 1983 recounts the technological Inventions and Political innovations – perhaps uncomfortably fascist in their implications for current readers – that brought the world out of depression and into a state approaching Utopia. [JC]
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 ...