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Saturday 12 July 2025
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, Simon
(? - ) UK author of No Man's Land (1975), set in a Dystopian Near Future Britain based on a coercive concentration of the working class community-destructive high-rise tenements. Something similar had in fact happened in the real world during the twentieth century after World War Two, a process flagrantly contradictive of the pre-War English ...
Galaxy [music]
German/Swiss prog-rock band, founded in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1977, who sang in English. The songs on their one album release, Nature's Clear Well (1978) are mostly environmental in theme, with a Dystopian vision of urban living, and the hint ("I've Come From A World") of extraterrestrial intervention. [AR]
Diplomat, A
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author (? -? ) of The Rise and Fall of the United States: A Leaf from History, A D 2060 (1898), a Future History describing the Near Future fall of America after the working classes have conducted an ill-advised rebellion against the wealthy. [JC]
Traveller
Role Playing Game (1977). Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). Designed by Marc Miller. / Traveller is the most commercially successful science fiction Role Playing Game to date, as well as one of the first. The game was developed in an unusual way; after the publication of the initial rules and supplements, much additional work was done by other companies such as FASA and ...
Nicholson, John
Pseudonym of UK cleric and author Norman Howe Parcell (1885-1955), whose sf novel, Space Ship to Venus (1948), carries by Spaceship a crew of adventurers to Venus [see subtitle in Checklist]. Costello, Psychic Investigator (coll 1954), assembles occult fictions [for Occult Detectives see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. [JC]
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 ...