SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Ramseyer, Edwin
(1896-1979) Swiss author whose Airmen Over the Suburb (trans Nora Bickley from manuscript 1939) is a Future War novel in which Paris is attacked from the air. [JC]
Babbage, Charles
(1791-1871) UK mathematician and inventor, a founder of the Analytical Society in 1811, and a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1816; the first of his nearly 100 technical papers, "On continued products", appeared in 1813. His recognition of the necessity for accurate calculation of mathematical tables, as used in navigation and astronomy – after a particular bad set of calculations, he is famously reported to have said, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam" – ...
Captain America
1. Comics character – a patriotic American Superhero whose costume design includes stars and stripes – created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941) for Timely Comics, later Marvel Comics. This title ceased in 1950; the character was briefly but unsuccessfully revived by Atlas Comics in 1953-1954; Marvel ...
Minot, Stephen
(1927-2010) US academic and author whose Chill of Dusk (1964) is a Ruined Earth tale set a several decades after a nuclear Holocaust, in a small Maine community increasing beset by invading barbarians, including a tribe of sun worshippers (see Religion) who sacrifice the protagonist's daughter. His attempts to preserve the records of prewar civilization, and the values that created that ...
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 ...