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Sunday 19 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 ...
Williams, Billy Dee
Working name of US actor and author William December Williams (1937- ), best known for playing Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) et cetera. He co-wrote with Rob MacGregor the Trent Calloway series beginning with OSI Net (1999), about American intelligence operatives gifted (or cursed) with ...
Stoneham, C T
(1895-1965) Indian-born author, educated in the UK and in active service during World War One, living much of his adult life in Kenya and South Africa; he wrote some mysteries and Westerns as by Norgrove Thurley. Of his fiction, much of which was set in Africa and featured animals both native and imported; his extremely numerous stories for the London Evening News between 1933 and 1964 usually focused on animals in the wild. ...
Fry, Stephen
(1957- ) UK actor and author, known for his versatility and wit, perhaps most widely famous for the role of Jeeves in the television series of P G Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster (1990-1993) and more recently as a popular pundit on the social network Twitter. Of his several novels, Making History (1996), a complex Time Travel tale whose outcome is an ...
Lockwood, Todd
(1957- ) US illustrator known primarily for his Fantasy work and for his long association with TSR/Dungeons & Dragons and then Wizards of the Coast. He received his formal art education at Colorado Institute of Art (now the Colorado Art Institute), and initially worked for a design agency before turning to full-time Illustration for clients in the advertising industry. / It was his interest in ...
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 ...