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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 ...
Meyer, Deon
(1958- ) South African author who writes in Afrikaans, most of his works being nonfantastic thrillers, chiefly in the Benny Griessel sequence; active from the early 1990s. He is of sf interest for the Near Future Koors (2016; trans K L Seegers as Fever 2017), set in a South Africa almost entirely depopulated by a Pandemic. The father and son ...
Cameron, John
(1927- ) US author. His borderline sf novel, The Astrologer (1972), like The Child (1976) by John Symonds, deals with a new Virgin Mary and a new Virgin Birth, in this case discovered via astrological means (see Astronomy; Messiahs). [JC] see also: Pseudoscience; Religion. /
Wilcox, Henry S
(1855-1924) US lawyer and author whose first novel was Flaws (1885; vt A Strange Flaw 1906) initially as By a Lawyer, in which a small fraud concatenates into a country-shaking scandal. He is of genre interest for his second novel, a Lost Race tale: The Great Boo-Boo: A Tale of Fun and Fancy, Replete with Love, Wit, Sentiment and Satire (1892), an early American example of pornographic sf, though ...
ab Hugh, Dafydd
(1960- ) US author, born David M Friedman, whose Welsh-sounding name has been legalized. He is perhaps best known for his novella, "The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured his Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" (August 1990 Asimov's). This is a striking Post-Holocaust tale whose linguistic invention recalls Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), but which 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 ...