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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.
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 ...
Hunger Games, The: Catching Fire
Film (2013). Lionsgate/Color Force. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Written by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on a novel by Suzanne Collins. Cast includes Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Jennifer Lawrence and Donald Sutherland. 146 minutes. Colour. / Francis Lawrence replaced Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games (2012), for the second adaptation of Collins's hugely popular series; ...
McKay, Herbert
(1881-? ) UK author of much nonfiction, and of A Camouflage Revolution (1929), in which the threat of a clandestine communist takeover of Great Britain is set in the Near Future. [JC]
Russell, Bertrand
(1872-1970) UK mathematician, philosopher and controversialist, grandson of John Russell, first Earl Russell; in 1931 he succeeded to the family title, becoming the third Earl Russell. Because of his pacifist publications and activities during the course of World War One, he lost his Cambridge fellowship and was imprisoned in 1918. His work in Mathematics was substantial, including a formalization of number theory in ...
Snell, Roy J
(1878-1959) US author of at least eighty-five Young Adult novels under his own name and as by David O'Hara, James Craig and Joseph Marino, most of them specifically directed to boys, though he wrote at least one associational series of mysteries for girls; his tales for younger children, beginning with Little White Fox and His Arctic Friends (1916), verge routinely on Animal Fantasy [see 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 ...