SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Zombicide
Board Game (2012). Guillotine Games. / Zombicide is a turn-based cooperative board game in which 1-6 players must survive a series of Zombie Disaster scenarios. Players take the role of an individual character with their own special powers and must survive a series of deadly turn-based attacks by zombies. The atmosphere of the game is intended to generate a B-movie ambience, with ...
More, Sir Thomas
(1478-1535) UK amateur actor, translator (of Lucian and others), lawyer, diplomat, politician and author. The son of a barrister, he was first educated for the Church, but soon decided upon a secular career. His legal training involved arguing both sides of any issue, a technique that would reappear in much of his writing, especially in Part 1 of Utopia. He advanced rapidly in public office, becoming both a Member of Parliament and Under-Sherriff of London in ...
Perry, Walter Copland
(1814-1911) UK author, lawyer and archaeologist in whose sf novel, The Revolt of the Horses (1898), the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735) arrive in the Near Future England of 1950. Finding humans as terrible as ever – a Future War features in the tale – they decide to destroy the race. [JC]
Blackford, Russell
(1954- ) Australian author and critic. The best of his small output of sf may be "Glass Reptile Breakout" (in Strange Attractors, anth 1985, ed Damien Broderick), the title story of Glass Reptile Breakout (anth 1990) edited by Van Ikin, a Cyberpunk tale of self-healing teenagers. His only novel, The Tempting of the Witch King (1983), ...
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 ...