SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
Vaughan, Herbert M
(1870-1948) Welsh local historian, bibliographer and author, administratively involved in World War One though not in active service. He is of sf interest primarily for two novels. Meleager: A Fantasy (1916) is set on a miniature version of Earth and the Solar System (see Great and Small), where a Eugenic Dystopia ...
Haraway, Donna J
(1944- ) US academic, Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her critical works operate at the intersection between science and Feminism. One highly influential and much discussed paper was "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" (1985 Socialist Review #80), exploring ...
Atlas/Seaboard Comics
Seaboard Periodicals was founded in 1974 by former Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman and his son Charles "Chip" Goodman. Atlas was the name of the imprint used for Seaboard's Comics titles: the company is referred to as Atlas/Seaboard to avoid confusion with the 1950s Atlas Comics, the predecessor of Marvel Comics. The company attempted to publish a line of colour comics in various genres, including the ...
Samachson, Joseph
(1906-1980) US research chemist who became a freelance author between 1938 and 1953 before returning to biochemistry, eventually retiring in 1973 after five years as Associate Clinical Professor of biochemistry at Loyola University, Chicago. His first story, "Bad Medicine" in Thrilling Wonder Stories for February 1941, was published as by William Morrison, under which name he wrote almost all his fiction of interest. Under the House Name ...
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 ...