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Monday 20 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 ...
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
US tv series (1974-1975). Francy Productions for Universal TV/ABC. Created by Jeff Rice. Executive producer: Darren McGavin. Produced by Paul Playton, Cy Chermak. Story consultant: David Chase. Cast includes Darren McGavin. Twenty 50-minute episodes. Colour. / This fondly remembered Television series was a spin-off from a successful made-for-tv movie, The Night Stalker (1972), produced by Dan Curtis and ...
Townsend, John Rowe
(1922-2014) UK journalist, academic and author, whose made-up middle name was used to distinguish him from the author John Townsend. After they had lived together for many years, he and Jill Paton Walsh were married in 2004. Most of his work was for Young Adult readers, beginning with Gumble's Yard (1961; vt Trouble in the Jungle 1969), a nonfantastic ...
Dominican Republic
Among the Hispanic islands of the Caribbean basin, the Dominican Republic is perhaps the country that shows the smallest amount of sf production. Although Josefina de la Cruz's (? - ) Una casa en el espacio ["A House in Space"] (1986) could be considered the first sf work from the island, this cannot be accepted without controversy owing to its generic ambivalence, Equipoisal between sf (perhaps), ...
Allen, Henry Wilson
(1912-1991) US author, as Will Henry, of many Westerns, including MacKenna's Gold (1963), later filmed. His sf novel, Genesis Five (1968), narrated by a resident Mongol, depicts the Soviet creation of a dubious Superman in Siberia in a world in which the Cold War has become perpetual. [JC]
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 ...