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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 ...
Barren, Charles
(1913-1999) UK teacher and author, best known for historical romances; co-author with R Cox Abel of Trivana I (1966), in which an overpopulated Earth uses the titular Spaceship (powered by an Ion Drive) to establish a Venus colony (see Colonization of Other Worlds). Barren also scripted a sf drama, "The Planet of ...
Bennett, Robert Jackson
(1984- ) US author whose first novel, Mr Shivers (2010), a supernatural thriller, plunges into what would become his dominant focus of interest: the Matter of America. In this tale, a man whose child has been murdered becomes a hobo in order to track down the eponymous creature responsible for this and other similar deaths, riding the rails of 1930s America in his quest for "justice" (see Crime and Punishment); ...
Columbia Workshop
Radio series (1936-1943; 1946-1947). CBS Radio for CBS Radio Network. Producers included Nila Mack and William N Robson. Directors included Irving Reis (1906-1953), Earle MacGill, Robson, Myron Sattler (?1907-?1981), Nila Mack, others. Staff writers included Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Hughes, Vic Knight, Reis and Robson. Several hundred 60-minute episodes were produced, some as two-part serials. At ...
Jeff Hawke
UK Comic strip created by writer Eric Souster and artist Sydney Jordan (1928- ). Some scripts were written by William Patterson and many of the later ones by Jordan. Jeff Hawke first appeared in 1954 in the London Daily Express, and ceased in 1974. During its lifetime it was the UK's leading sf comic strip. The overall scenario depicted Earth as a primitive planet on the periphery of a highly advanced galactic civilization, whose ...
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 ...