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Thursday 16 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 ...
Holy War
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Lynn Willis. / Holy War's framing narrative describes the creation of a Pocket Universe in which time passes at a greatly accelerated rate by a vast alien entity. After the construction is complete, this being realizes that life has appeared on one of the planets orbiting the handful of stars in its microverse. While the entity is considering the ...
Sullivan, Tricia
(1968- ) US-born author, in UK from 1995, who has also written as by Valery Leith; married during the 1990s (dates unknown) to Todd Wiggins. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Morpheus" in Discoveries (anth 1995) edited by Alan Lothian; most of her work since that point has been in long forms. Her first novel, Lethe (1995), is partly set in the distant Near Future ...
Robson, Eddie
(1978- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Light That Never Dies" in Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Dead Men Diaries (anth 2000) edited by Paul Cornell, a volume in the Doctor Who spinoff series Professor Bernice Summerfield to which Robson has contributed several other tales as well as editing the related anthology Present Danger (anth ...
Levy, Joseph Hiam
(1838-1913) UK economist, journalist and author, active from before 1870, in politics a radical individualist whose later arguments prefigure American thought many years later (see Libertarian SF), and which led him to oppose vaccination and other social measures (in this, too, he prefigured later positions). An Individualist's Utopia (1912) presents in lightly fictionalized terms a Utopia drawn up on these lines, ...
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 ...