SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 14 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 ...
Muse
UK rock band, formed in Devon by frontman Matthew Bellamy (1978- ). The group favours a bombastic and indeed deliberately melodramatic musical style, guitar-based but augmented with many other instruments, amplified and overdriven to sometimes preposterous levels. The group's songs, often science-fictional, are conveyed in Bellamy's distinctive voice, stronger at the top-end and with a wailing falsetto. This is a musical mixture that works well with grandiose or ...
Ralph, James
(1695-1762) American-born historian, controversialist and author, in UK from 1724; his Satirical play, The Astrologer (1744 chap) – remotely based on the mistaken-doubles comedy, Albumazar (1615), by Thomas Tomkis (circa 1580-1634) – targets the tropes and lunacies of what we now call Proto SF, as conveyed through its fatuous protagonists' attempts to make sense of the vision of ...
Yugoslavia
The entry, written for the second edition of the encyclopedia, awaits updating and linking to further new entries covering the development of sf in the various post-1992 successor states such as Croatia. / Yugoslavia was established as a nation in 1918, but the first sf works in two of its three linguistic areas – the Serbocroat and the Slovenian – long predated that. The first sf book to appear in Serbocroat was the translation in 1873 of Jules ...
Resistance: Fall of Man
Videogame (2006). Insomniac Games (IG). Platforms: PS3. / Resistance is a well crafted First Person Shooter set in an Alternate History in which aliens invaded the UK in the early 1950s. The setting is vividly realized, from the devastated towns of Northern England where the last remnants of the armed forces launch their desperate raids to the conversion factories where ...
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 ...