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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.
Site updated on 20 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Dent, John Charles
(1841-1888) UK-born author in Canada from early childhood, of whose The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales (coll 1888) the title story – "The Gerrard Street Mystery" (May 1877 Belford's Monthly) – is a tale of Precognition. Of the other three long tales, "The Haunted House on Duchess Street" is a ghost story. [JC]
Star Trek [film]
Film (2009). Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment present a Bad Robot/MavroCine Pictures production. Directed by J J Abrams. Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry. Cast includes Eric Bana, John Cho, Bruce Greenwood, Chris Hemsworth, Leonard Nimoy, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban and Anton Yelchin. 127 minutes. ...
Williams, Billy Dee
Working name of US actor and author William December Williams (1937- ), best known for playing Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) et cetera. He co-wrote with Rob MacGregor the Trent Calloway series beginning with OSI Net (1999), about American intelligence operatives gifted (or cursed) with ...
Baggott, Julianna
(1969- ) US poet and author who has focused on dysfunctional family-romance narratives based on her own family – including a volume of poems, The Country of Mothers (coll 2001) and The Madam (2003), which is slightly fantasticated – and tales for teenage girls. Her Bodies sequence for children – comprising The Anybodies (2004), The Nobodies (2005) and The Somebodies (2006), all ...
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 ...