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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.
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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 ...
Gibbs, Anthony
(1902-1975) UK author of a very Near Future sf novel, The New Crusade (1931), in which society is transformed by a millionaire so that nudism may triumph. [JC]
Genone, Hudor
Pseudonym of US soldier, businessman and author William James Roe (1843-1921) for his sf and fantasy; he also produced some non-fantastic work under his own name and under other pseudonyms, including G I Cervus and Viroe. He was a freethinker – a disposition of mind found with surprising infrequency among nineteenth-century sf writers – and in an sf Satire, Inquirendo Island (1886), he dramatized in unmistakable terms his negative feelings ...
Cogswell, Theodore R
(1918-1987) US author and academic, who claimed to have been a teenaged ambulance driver on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He began publishing sf in June 1952 with what proved to be one of his most successful stories, "The Specter General" for Astounding. In this long, amusing tale – much in the vein Keith Laumer was later to make his own – a long-forgotten maintenance division of the Galactic Protectorate ...
Davis, Frederick C
(1902-1977) US author of pulp fiction, sometimes under pseudonyms, from 1922 or earlier. He published detective fiction in book form from the mid-1930s until the end of his active career in the late 1960s. His most interesting early work of sf interest – mainly through explanations of the one-way Moon-shaped glass helmet worn as a disguise by the crimebusting hero – was the Moon Man sequence, 39 novellas published from 1933 to 1937 in Ten Detective Aces. After the ...
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 ...