SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Carr, Carol
(1938-2021) US fan and author, active in Fandom from the early 1960s (including participation in the "secret" APA Lilapa and articles in the Fanzines Innuendo, Lighthouse and Trap Door); married to Terry Carr from 1961 until his death in 1987; married from 2000 until her death to US fanzine publisher Robert Lichtman. She began ...
Brown, Rosel George
(1926-1967) US author with an advanced degree in ancient Greek; for three years she worked as a welfare visitor in her native Louisiana. She began publishing stories in September 1958 with "From an Unseen Censor" for Galaxy; some of her tales were interplanetary, some more typical of "women's" fiction. A Handful of Time (coll 1963) assembles much of her early work. The Sibyl Sue Blue series – Sibyl Sue Blue (1966; vt ...
Jackson, Greg [2]
(1983- ) US author, active from around 2010. Some of the tales assembled in Prodigals (coll 2016) occupy the water margins of Fantastika; his first novel, The Dimensions of a Cave (2023), set in the very Near Future, follows a journalist's investigation of a secret government project that has generated an AI capable of creating a ...
Gastine, Louis
(1858-1935) French author, often on subjects relating to airplane technology and air travel; a translated novel of sf interest is Les Torpilleurs de l'air: Prodigieux exploits d'un aviateur français (1912; trans G H Marchat as War in Space: Or, an Air-Craft War Between France and Germany 1913) with Léon Perrin (not acknowledged in the translation), a Future War tale set within Earth's atmosphere (not in space); a tale ...
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 ...