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.
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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 ...
Wild Robot, The
US animated film (2024). DreamWorks Animation. Based on The Wild Robot (2016) by Peter Brown. Directed and written by Chris Sanders. Voice cast includes Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Lupita Nyong'o, Catherine O'Hara and Pedro Pascal. 102 minutes. Colour. / Following a typhoon, several damaged boxes containing Robots are washed up on the shores of a forested island; curious otters accidentally press the On switch ...
Adams, Norman
(1933-2014) US illustrator, active from the early 1950s, often signing his work Adams, which has occasionally led to some confusion with the work of Tom Adams, as both specialized in trompe l'oeil effects, in both cases sometimes startlingly effective. Adams may be best known for his cover for the first edition of Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs; the image itself closely replicates his cover for an 1963 UK reprint, as ...
Rogers, John Rankin
(1838-1901) US politician (Governor of Washington 1897-1901) and author of The Graftons; Or, Looking Forward: A Story of Pioneer Life (1893; vt Looking Forward: The Story of an American Farm 1898), a Utopia structured as a reflection upon Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). [JC]
Doyle, Richard
(1948-2017) UK author whose Near Future Disaster tale, Deluge (1976), drowns London in time-honoured fashion, as does Flood (2002), although the two are different stories based around the identical premise of storms causing a tidal surge that wrecks the east coast and overwhelms the London Barrier. [JC/SH]
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 ...