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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 ...
Keshishian, John M
(1923-2021) Greek-born surgeon, academic, archaeologist and author, in US from 1931, whose Near Future sf novel, with Jacob Hay (whom see for details), is Autopsy for a Cosmonaut (1969; vt Death of a Cosmonaut 1970). The Mayan Shard Caper (2006) focuses on the speculative assumption that there may have been a second Mayan race, perhaps distinct in some ways from Homo sapiens. [JC]
Fnord
A much-quoted item of sf Terminology, originally introduced in the anarcho-religious tract Principia Discordia (1965) by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, and widely popularized in the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In the Paranoia-riddled context of an assumed global conspiracy, fnords are defined as ...
Page, Kathy
(1958- ) UK author, in Canada from 2001, whose first novels – Back in the First Person (1986) and The Unborn Dreams of Clara Riley (1987) – are associational, though tinged with elements of literary fantasy. Island Paradise (1989), set a century after the Unfought War, promulgates an ambiguous worldwide Utopia whose citizens enjoy lives uncluttered by violence, but are bullied to die soon ...
Morris, Jim
(1940- ) US author whose The Sheriff of Purgatory (1979; rev vt Spurlock: Sheriff of Purgatory 1987) describes, with moments of sharpness, a Post-Holocaust conflict between the sheriff and the Mafia in the eponymous Arkansas county. The action soon moves to a devastated New York. Breeder: Dewey Ann (1988) is similarly set in a ...
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 ...