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Thursday 16 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 ...
Dallas, Ian
(1930-2021) Scottish teacher and Sufi-based leader and advocate of a traditional though (to Western eyes) meliorist form of Islam, and author. At some early point he adopted the name Abdalqadir as-Sufi, which we take here to be a legal change. His first book, The Book of Strangers (1972) as Dallas, is of sf interest for its depiction of a Near-Future early twenty-first century high-Technology surveillance ...
Hyde, Mark Powell
(1881-1952) US author in whose Young Adult novel, The Strange Inventor: A Curious Adventure Story (1927), Merlin Time Travels incognito to the twentieth century, where he meets the young protagonist, and amazes him with the engineless car (another of his Inventions) in which he carries him away. The two visit the future, where adventures are had, and the past, ditto. Merlin himself is a ...
Kennaway, James
(1928-1968) Scottish publisher, screenwriter and author best known for such works outside the sf field as Tunes of Glory (1956). His borderline sf novel is The Mind Benders (1963), which applies Mainstream tactics to a story about brainwashing and the psychological consequences of overexposure to experimental conditions of Sensory Deprivation. The book was written from his script for ...
Ufofu
Shortlived US band, based in Dallas, Texas, whose members were Joe Butcher and the brothers Ben Curtis (1978-2013) and Brandon Curtis. Stylistically Ufofu were a blend of punk jaggedness and a jazzier experimental element; their albums Extra Terrestrial Jazz Distortion (?1996) and Ufofu (1997) are imaginative and energetic if not wholly coherent examples of postpunk sf. [AR/DRL] see also: SF Music. / links / ...
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 ...