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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Grimes, Lee
(1920-2009) US author whose Ax of Atlantis: A Chandra Smith Adventure (1975) depicts its female secret agent protagonist's attempts to forestall the attempts of a kind of reborn Minos to re-establish the rule of ancient Crete. An earlier Chandra Smith adventure, The Eye of Shiva (1974), seems to have no fantastic content. The premise of Retro Lives (1993) is that a genetic predisposition can generate a Time Loop, ...
Sky, Kathleen
(1943- ) US author born Kathleen McKinney (the Sky came from her first husband Karl Sky) whose first genre story was "One Ordinary Day, with Box" in Generation (anth 1972) edited by David Gerrold. She was married to Stephen Goldin 1972-1982, and wrote with him The Business of Being a Writer (1982); she is thus also known as Kathleen Sky-Goldin but has not used this version of ...
Faber, Michel
(1960- ) Dutch/Australian/Scottish author, born in Holland, raised in Australia from the age of seven, resident from 1993 in Scotland, where much of his fiction is located; partner from 2016 of Louisa Young. He is best known for The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), a blockbuster novel set in a nonfantastic Victorian London but narrated as though to a time traveller from the future; a nonfantastic collection, ...
Scientific Detective Monthly
US letter-size magazine; ten monthly issues, January to October 1930, published from New York by Techni-Craft Publishing Co; edited by Hugo Gernsback, with Arthur B Reeve as editorial consultant. It was a sister magazine to Science Wonder Stories (see Wonder Stories) and Air Wonder Stories. From issue #6 it was retitled ...
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 ...