SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 20 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Werber, Bernard
(1961- ) French author, most of whose work remains untranslated into English, though the first volume of his Les Fourmis ["The Ants"] sequence, Les Fourmis (1991; trans Margaret Rocques as Empire of the Ants 1996), gives some insight into a creative strategy he has followed subsequently. The admixture of Horror in SF topoi and philosophical discourse (conveyed in part through ample ...
Dr. Octagon
One of the pseudonyms used by US rapper Keith Matthew Thornton (1963- ), best known as Kool Keith. The character Dr. Octagon was introduced on the album Dr. Octogonecologyst (1996), as an Alien, Time Travelling surgeon and gynaecologist, who appears to either kill or sleep with virtually all his patients. The emphasis is on inventive wordplay and scatological Humour, and ...
Potter, Alexander
(? - ) US author, artist and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Birthmarked" as A J Potter in Swords of the Rainbow (anth 1996) edited by Eric Garber and Jewel Gomez. His first edited genre title was the Original Anthology Assassin Fantastic (anth 2001) with Martin H Greenberg, which included his own story "On My Honor" as by ...
Kelley, William Melvin
(1937-2017) US author whose celebrated short novel A Different Drummer (1959) is an sf fable telling of Black history in an imaginary town in an imagined southern state of the USA (see Race in SF), and ending with a mass emigration of all Blacks from this state in 1957. The isolation of this town [for Polder see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] is reminiscent of the ...
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 ...