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Friday 17 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 ...
Albo, Mike
(1969- ) US comedian, playwright, journalist and author, variously active from the early 1990s. His first novel, Hornito: My Lie Life (2000), contains stabs of Satire but remains nonfantastic, as does The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (2005) with Virginia Hefferman [neither book is listed below]. Sexotheque (performed 16 December 1999 Eno's, Austin, Texas) is a musical ...
Mitchell, Adrian
(1932-2008) UK author, perhaps best known for his poetry; many of the children's poems assembled in Nothingmas Day (coll 1984 chap) with John Lawrence (1933- ) are Fantasy. His second novel, The Bodyguard (1970), is the deathbed narrative of a representative figure of a Near Future UK, a paramilitary bodyguard whose reminiscences of his various jobs defending the totalitarian state ...
Haskin, Byron
(1899-1984) US cinematographer, special effects creator and director, in the American army during World War One. His film career began in 1919 when he became an assistant cameraman for Louis J Selznick. He directed four films in 1927, but later worked mostly as a cinematographer; he supervised the special-effects department for Warner Bros 1936-1947. In 1947 he began directing again with I Walk Alone, a Hal Wallis production. In 1952 he formed a ...
Benjamin, Chloe
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (2014), edges into the fantastic through its protagonists' obsessive quest to acquire lucid dreaming skills (see Virtual Reality), guided and perhaps deluded by a shamanic researcher. / The Immortalists (2018) similarly engages its four protagonists – who in 1969 have had their futures told by a psychic capable of actual ...
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 ...