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Tuesday 14 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 ...
Schwehn, Kaethe
(circa 1979- ) US academic, memoirist and author whose first novel, The Rending and the Nest (2018) is of sf interest for its depiction of a vast Disaster, the disappearance of 95% of the human race, though typically of the Mainstream Writer of SF this "inexplicable" vanishment is more metaphorical than actual. The survivors of this disaster, or some of them, occupy a remote ...
Kemp, Randall H
(1852-1914) US field mineralogist from 1890 or earlier on expeditions in Pacific Rim states of America, and author of A Half-Breed Dance and Other Far Western Stories: Mining Camp, Indian and Hudson's Bay Tales Based on the Experiences of the Author (coll 1909), which contains two tales of interest: "Underneath Spokane" features a virtual Hollow Earth of underground caverns; and in the Lost World described in "The ...
Kimmel, Daniel M
(1955- ) US journalist, film critic and author, active as a columnist for The Boston Herald (1996-1998) and elsewhere 1984-current, most of his nonfiction being concerned with Cinema and the Media Landscape in general. Of his several volumes of nonfiction, Jar Jar Binks Must Die ... and Other Observations About Science Fiction Movies (coll 2011) is of considerable interest for its ...
Captain Justice
The hero of a long-running series of boys' stories (see Boys' Papers) published in Modern Boy, a weekly magazine published by Amalgamated Press through the 1930s. The stories were written by Murray Roberts (Robert Murray Graydon) and later – following his death – by John Garbutt. Very British, Captain Justice wore white ducks, smoked cigars and worked out of Titanic ...
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 ...