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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 ...
Wilson, D Harlan
(1971- ) US author whose first publication, The Kafka Effekt (coll of linked stories 2001), assembles and interlinks a pattern of short narratives, proclaimedly post-modern in their structuring (see Postmodernism and SF), and clearly intended to surrealize the parable abyss of Franz Kafka, while evoking twenty-first century cultural Amnesia and visions of ...
Funkadelic
George Clinton's musical collective. Some consider it ineligible to consider Funkadelic as separate from Parliament, Clinton's other famous band, although the origins of the two are separate (Funkadelic was originally the backing group for "the Parliaments", as Parliament were originally called). Legal difficulties led to Parliament becoming subsumed entirely within Funkadelic by 1968, although these difficulties were cleared ...
Erdrich, Louise
(1954- ) US author whose many novels, mostly set in or adjacent to the fictional Ozhibi'iganan reservation, in Ojibwe/Chippewa country in North Dakota, have strongly and rightly shaped the presentation of Native American experience over the past century of life under the complex and oppressive surveillance of a guilt-ridden but compulsively exploitive conqueror civilization, composing a series of what may be thought of as a series of Westerns ...
Elliott, Janice
(1931-1995) UK author from 1962 of sophisticated novels of domestic passion which frequently reach for a sense of brooding Equipoise with the supernatural and, occasionally, sf. Her sf novel, The Summer People (1980), places in a Near-Future world one of her typical casts, who decide it would be a good idea, while society collapses off-stage, to remain esconced in their holiday resort for the time being; a similar ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...