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Tuesday 21 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 ...
Seidel, Frederick
(1936- ) US poet active from the end of the 1950s, his Poetry being highly contentious from the beginning of his career when his first book, Final Solutions (coll 1963 chap), was rejected for publication after winning a YMCA-funded contest judged by Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell. The three judges resigned in protest; and Seidel's at times scatologically Satirical response to American ...
Yoshioka Hitoshi
(1960-2023) Japanese author closely associated with the visual media, whose vast output and populist panderings often occlude his deeper efforts at Satire and more mature experiments in Recursive SF. Dropping out of Waseda University partway through a literature degree, he worked part-time at the Anime company Studio Hard, and made his professional debut novelizing the non-sf film ...
Terrorvision
Film (1986). Altar/Empire. Executive producer Charles Band. Directed by Ted Nicolaou. Written by Nicolaou. Cast includes Chad Allen, Diane Franklin, Gerrit Graham, Jonathan Gries and Mary Woronov. 83 minutes. Colour. / This lurid exploitation-movie-cum-satire has good moments. A hungry Alien beast first appears on the television screen, then materializes in the house, of wife-swapping vulgarians, a ...
Robbins, David L
(1954- ) US academic and author, most of whose work is nonfantastic and is set in World War Two. Of sf interest is the Souls to Keep sequence comprising Souls to Keep (1998) and The Betrayal Game (2008), which begins in an Alternate History version of World War Two whose Jonbar Point is the assassination of President Roosevelt; 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 ...