SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 14 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 ...
Vachell, Horace Annesley
(1861-1955) UK land speculator (in 1880s-1890s California), playwright and author, active in the latter capacity from about 1900. In The Other Side: Being Certain Passages in the Life of a Genius (1910), a man involved in a crime investigation acquires knowledge from another Dimension. [JC]
Simpson, Howard
(? - ) US author whose routine sf novel is West of the Moon (1968). [JC/DRL] /
Wu, Frank
(1964- ) US artist and author, although he primarily earns his living by applying knowledge garnered from his PhD in bacterial genetics to the field of patent law. As a writer, Wu has mostly published short satirical pieces, some in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, although "Worlds in Collusion: A Planetary Romance" (in Visual Journeys, anth 2007, ed Eric Reynolds) attempts to strike a more serious note in describing an unusual romance. His ...
Gorman, Ed
(1941-2016) US author, principally of crime, western and horror fiction, in which fields his reputation was high. He was active in Fandom in the 1950s and 1960s, in the latter decade publishing the Fanzine Ciln. His principal contribution to sf was his co-authorship as Richard Driscoll of the Star Precinct trilogy with Kevin D Randle; this opens with Star Precinct (1992) and ...
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 ...