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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.
Site updated on 20 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 ...
Malato, Charles
(1857-1938) French anarchist, journalist and author, deported at age seventeen to New Caledonia with his father, the latter having been involved in the 1871 Paris Commune. Malato himself, back in France from 1881, espoused in Philosophie de l'anarche ["The Philosophy of Anarchy"] (1897) and agitated for a form of libertarian communism. The transgressive implications of his Lost World novel Perdu au Maroc ["Lost in Morocco"] (1915) ...
Smythe, James
(1980- ) UK author who writes Young Adult fiction as J P Smythe; his first novel, Hereditation (2010) is an essentially nonfantastic Gothic set in New York. Of sf interest is The Testimony (2012), in which a Dystopian Near Future world is confronted with a seemingly irrefutable annunciation – perhaps in the very ...
Kacvinsky, Katie
(? - ) US author whose work has been restricted to the Young Adult market, with an emphasis on teenage romances; in the Maddie sequence beginning with Awaken (2011), this pattern is integrated with some smoothness into an sf world: a Near Future California whose Dystopian nature is sensed by the young ...
Hossain, Saad Z
(1979- ) Bangladeshi author whose first novel, Baghdad Immortals (2013; vt Escape from Baghdad! 2015), treats the world of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein as a surreal nightmare (see Imperialism; Satire; War); the tale traces the appalled and appalling "antics" of its two protagonists as they attempt to smuggle a torturer out of the land he has helped ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...