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Sunday 19 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 ...
Planet Stories
US Pulp magazine, 71 issues, Winter 1939 to Summer 1955, published by Love Romances Publishing (a subsidiary of Fiction House), edited by Malcolm Reiss (Winter 1939-Summer 1942), Wilbur S Peacock (Fall 1942-Fall 1945), Chester Whitehorn (Winter 1945-Summer 1946), Paul L Payne (Fall 1946-Spring 1950), Jerome Bixby (Summer 1950-July 1951), Malcolm Reiss (September 1951-January 1952), Jack O'Sullivan (March ...
File 770
US Fanzine since January 1978, edited from Los Angeles by Mike Glyer, roughly bimonthly until 1999 but thereafter publishing three or fewer issues per year until 2016 (see below); the name alludes to the legendary (though only in Fandom) party in Room 770 of the 1951 Worldcon hotel that ran for two days and was a highlight of the event. / A newsletter covering Fandom, with ...
Machinima
Term used to describe films produced by recording the output from a Videogame as it is being played. This approach can produce visuals comparable in quality with those created by conventional computer animation techniques for considerably less effort, though clearly the choice of subject matter is affected by the nature of the game being used. Early examples of the form were created by players of Quake (1996) by adding (generally ...
Wojtowicz, Douglas P
(1970- ) Author who under the House Name James Axler has contributed several later volumes to the long Outlanders sequence of Ruined Earth sf, discussed in more detail in the entry for James Axler. [DRL]
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 ...