SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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 14 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 ...
Conquest, Joan
(1883-1941) Pseudonym of UK author Mary Eliza Louise Cooke (Mrs Leonard Cooke), born Mary Eliza Gripper and also known as Sister Martin-Nicholson following her first, brief marriage in 1907 to Allen Martin Reuben Nicholson (1883-1915); she married Leonard Cooke in 1915. She is known for floridly euphemistic (though superficially daring) novels of high romance, typical of which are Leonie of the Jungle (1921), whose eponymous heroine escapes the ...
Pellerin, Georges
Pseudonym of unidentified French author (? -? ); in his introduction to that author's only known work of sf interest – Le Monde dans 2000 Ans (1878; trans Brian Stableford as The World in 2000 Years 2011) – Stableford plausibly argues that he may have been a political economist named Gustave Dupuynode (1817-1898), who held similar opinions to those expressed in "Pellerin"'s ...
Rose, Mark
(1939- ) US academic and author whose assistance in preparing Kingsley Amis's New Maps of Hell (1960) was acknowledged by its author. An apocalyptic Post-Holocaust short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) edited by Amis and Robert Conquest, did not lead to a fiction career, and Rose remains best known in the sf field ...
Electric Spec
US low-paying Online Magazine published by Lesley Smith of Boulder, Colorado, initially with the editorial assistance of David Hughes, Renata Hill and Georgia Simonds but now edited by Betsy Dornbusch and David Hughes. Originally published three times a year, the magazine began in Spring 2006 and went quarterly from Spring 2010. The first four volumes, until Winter 2009, were downloadable in pdf format, but issues are now only accessible at the website. ...
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 ...