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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.
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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 ...
Nuttall, Alice
(? - ) UK Comics writer and author, in the latter of fantasy tales directed to the younger regions of the Young Adult market; active from around 2013. The Zombie Project (2025) depicts a Near Future world struggling to survive the devastations of Climate Change and Ecological decline. All ...
Medvedev, Yuri
(1937- ) Russian anthologist, editor and author, known for his Pan-Slavic rhetoric and his sometimes doctrinaire espousal of conservative literary and political values in his work, and in his constraining influence on others; active from around 1960. His work has not been widely translated, though Chasa terpeniya (coll of linked stories 1983; trans Robert King as The Chariot of Time 1988) provides an orthodox ...
Wright, R H
(1874-after 1920) Irish-born author, in New Zealand for part of his adult life, in active service during World War One after – it seems – having stopped writing; he is recorded as surviving the war. Of sf interest among his several books is The Outer Darkness (1906), an awkward but effective early exercise in Equipoise. The protagonist, having died, is transported to another planet, whose monarch ...
Marshall, Archibald
Working name of UK author Arthur Hammond Marshall (1866-1934), who was prolific and popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. His Erewhonian sf Satire Upsidonia (1915) amusingly places a young man in a Parallel World, an Underground civilization somehow linked with ours, where all values, in particular Economic ones, suffer a reversal: wealth is ...
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 ...