SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
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 ...
Fenn, George Manville
(1831-1909) UK teacher, publisher, editor and author, of whose 170 or more novels and collections, mostly for the Young Adult market, some are of sf interest, including The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (1884), a Lost Race tale set in South America; The Man With a Shadow (1888 3vols), in which a Mad Scientist's attempts to generate a state of ...
Teixeira, Kevin
(? - ) US author whose Near Future sf novel, A Virtual Soul (1999), follows the adventures of a Genetically Engineered Slave, victim of a Dystopian world conceived in Cyberpunk terms, as he attempts to acquire and assert a human-like Identity. ...
Gregg Press
US publisher of reprints in hardcover, a subsidiary of G K Hall & Co. The Gregg Press Science Fiction Reprint Series, edited by David G Hartwell with Lloyd W Currey as associate editor, included a variety of novels and collections dating from the eighteenth century until recent times. Among them were several new volumes, including Alyx (coll 1976; vt The Adventures of Alyx 1985) by Joanna ...
Fixup
A term first used by A E van Vogt to describe a book made up of previously published stories fitted together – usually with the addition of newly written or published cementing material – so that they read as a novel. Aware that fixups are immensely more common in Genre SF than in any other literature in the world, we borrowed the term for the 1979 edition of this encyclopedia, and continue to use it now; an example is ...
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 ...