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Thursday 16 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 ...
Thompson, Raymond H
(1941- ) Canadian academic and author, a scholar of mediaeval literature and professor emeritus in the Department of English at Acadia University in Wolfeville, Nova Scotia. His primary specialization is in King Arthur and the Matter of Britain [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. He began to publish essays of sf interest with "Shai Dorsai! A Study of the Hero Figure in Gordon R. Dickson's ...
Colvin, James
House Name used primarily by Michael Moorcock for book reviews and stories in New Worlds, and for one independent collection of stories: The Deep Fix (coll 1966), which led to the band name Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix. The name was occasionally used by other contributors for book reviews. Eventually Moorcock reported ...
McQuinn, Donald E
(1930- ) US soldier and author whose first sf novel (his fifth overall), Warrior (1990), packs into its setting – a Ruined Earth America 500 years after the nation's nuclear destruction – almost every Cliché available to writers of barbarian-warrior novels: a variety of agon-based tribal societies; a woman-run church; a batch of twenty-first-century warriors freshly resurrected ...
Numa Shōzō
Pseudonym of a controversial Japanese author, whose identity was never confirmed, but believed by many, including the National Library of Japan, to be a pen-name for Tetsuo Amano (1926-2008), an editor at the Shinchōsha publishing house. Amano once admitted to being Numa, but later retracted his confession. Other candidates, largely discounted, have included the authors Tatsuhiko Shibusawa and Ryūichi Tamura, as well as Yukio ...
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 ...