SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 14 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Transgender SF
In the real world, Gender reassignment surgery dates back to around 1930 as a technique; an earlier operation, in 1918, involved only removal of breasts and ovaries. The full procedure only became widely known to the general public, however, after the media blitz that surrounded Christine Jorgensen's transition in 1953. For reasons which may possibly have nothing to do with social attitudes (but almost certainly do), there seems to be no genuine early sf example of an ...
Hughes, Ted
(1930-1998) Working name of UK poet Edward James Hughes for all his writing. He is best known for volumes of dark, violent verse such as Crow (coll 1970; rev 1971), which like much of his work features representations of other species in terms hinting at internally generated but mythically resonant metamorphoses; also of interest as an unfettered contribution to the fantastic is Gaudete (1977), a book-length narrative poem whose protagonist, after his ...
Philipson, Alan
(? - ) Author who under the House Name James Axler has contributed several later volumes to the very lengthy Deathlands sequence of Ruined Earth sf, discussed in more detail in the entry for James Axler. [DRL]
Shagan, Steve
(1927-2015) US screenwriter, producer and author, involved in some adaptations of Tarzan to the screen, and producer of 37 of the 57 episodes in the Television series Tarzan (1966-1968). Of some sf interest is The Formula (1979), based on his filmscript for The Formula (1980), in which contemporary oil companies attempt to destroy all evidence of the Nazi Invention ...
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 ...