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Friday 17 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 ...
Muñoz, Gloria
(1987- ) US poet, translator and author of Colombian ancestry whose first novel, This Is the Year (2025), atmospherically depicts the sensory and broader effects of Climate Change in Near-Future Florida upon its Young-Adult cast. The protagonist, stricken by the death of her twin sister in a car crash, is given the chance to join a privatized mission to the ...
Stringer, Arthur
(1874-1950) Canadian poet and author, in the US from 1898; prolific in several genres from 1894, though he concentrated on survival tales set in the northern wilderness of his native land. The Man Who Couldn't Sleep (coll 1919) and The Wolf Woman (1928) are fantasy. Of sf interest are a film tie, The Story Without a Name (1924) with Russell Holman, in which a Death Ray appears, an ...
Cantril, Hadley
(1906-1969) US psychologist and sociologist whose The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic: With the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (1940), "with the assistance of" Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, prints for the first time the script by Howard Koch for Orson Welles's 30 October 1938 Radio broadcast of H G Wells's ...
N3F
Short name for the National Fantasy Fan Federation, formed in the USA in 1941; this was the brain-child of Damon Knight, who called for it in a Fanzine article titled "Unite – or Fie!" (October 1940 Fanfare ed Art Widner). After a succession of short-lived and factional US fan associations in the 1930s, the N3F proved a stable and enduring national organization. However, despite its long existence, it has maintained a ...
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 ...