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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.
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 ...
Barker, D A
(1947- ) UK telecommunications engineer and author whose first two novels were sf published by Robert Hale Limited: A Matter of Evolution (1975), in which a Mutant race on Earth imports female humanoids for research, and A Question of Reality (1981). [DRL]
Kelly, Teague M
(? -? ) US author in whose sf tract, Mucca Scob; Or, Threads of Pre-Historic and Present History, Concatenated (1885), the elder of a Native American tribe in northern California describes to the narrator his several Reincarnations over the previous thousands of years; several of these lives having been led on other planets, he is in fact an Alien. His ...
Tolstoy, Alexei
(1883-1945) Russian author, sometimes mistakenly thought to have been a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); he was not in fact a blood relative of the famous Tolstoy, though his mother's second husband was related, and gave Tolstoy his surname. Tolstoy is best known for two books whose first versions appeared in the experimental 1920s and both of which were revised in the decade of terror which followed. Aelita (first version #6 1922-#1-2 1923 Krasnaya Nov' as "Aelita ...
Donawerth, Jane
(? - ) US academic, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Maryland, who has written extensively about Women SF Writers. She contributed entries about such authors to the 1993 second edition of this encyclopedia. Her first book-length publication of genre interest was Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (anth 1994) edited by herself (as Jane L Donawerth) and Carol 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 ...