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Monday 20 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 ...
Turk, H C
(1958- ) US photographer, painter and author who began publishing sf with the comic adventure Ether Ore (1987), an Alternate History tale where the world has been transformed by the eponymous Power Source, which makes space travel cheap, and where a female "Hitler" is a force for peace. The exceedingly ambitious Black Body (1989) presents, in terms readable as both sf and ...
Mills, Sam
Working name of UK journalist and author Samantha Mills (1975- ), who began to publish work of genre interest with "Tic Tac Man" in New Wave of Speculative Fiction: The What If Factor (anth 2005) edited by Sean Wright. Her first novel, the Young Adult A Nicer Way to Die (2006) is nonfantastic suspense-horror; her third, Blackout (2010), is set in a Near Future ...
Ogilvy, Arthur James
(1834-1914) Indian-born civil servant and author, educated in the UK, in Australia from 1851, most of whose work is nonfiction, some of it studies of Evolution. Of sf interest is The Ape Man (1913 chap) as by A J O, in which a prospector discovers the last survivors of a tribe of quasi-human apes (see Apes as Human) in the Amazon, and lives with them. [JC]
John Carter
Film (2012). Walt Disney Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by Andrew Stanton. Written by Stanton & Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (February-July 1912 All-Story as "Under the Moons of Mars" as by Norman Bean; 1917). Cast includes Lynn Collins, Willem ...
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 ...