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Saturday 18 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 ...
Wentworth-James, Gertie de S
Working name of UK author Gertrude Wentworth-James (1874-1933), born Gertrude Soilleux Webster, who sometimes wrote as Gertie S Wentworth-James. Some of her fifty or more flirtatious but ultimately decorous romances contain elements of sf interest, beginning with The Soul That Came Back (1922), a tale of Reincarnation. In the Near Future The Television Girl (1928), an osteopath falls in love with a ...
Rats
Rats, though sometimes cherished as pets (albeit far less frequently than Cats or Dogs) are traditionally unpopular: disliked as household pests and often feared, sometimes to the extent of outright phobia. They feature in the ultimate Torture of Room 101, tailored to the protagonist's greatest dread, in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Rats and their fleas ...
MacClure, Victor
(1887-1963) Scottish artist and author, born either Victor Thom MacWalter MacClure or simply Thom MacWalter; in active service during World War One; he specialized in detective novels and contemporary thrillers, and also published as by Peter Craig. Of sf interest is a Scientific Romance, The Ark of the Covenant: A Romance of the Air and of Science (1924; vt Ultimatum: A Romance of the Air 1924 ...
Levy, Roger
(1955- ) UK dentist and author whose Reckless Sleep sequence, comprising Reckless Sleep (2000) and Dark Heavens (2003), depicts a deeply depressed far Near Future UK Dystopia in a state of imminent collapse whose population escapes all this, plus a succession of natural Disasters, via Virtual Reality constructs ...
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 ...