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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 ...
Nabokov, Vladimir
(1899-1977) Russian-born US poet, translator, entomologist and author. Raised in Russia until the Revolution, and then educated at Cambridge, he lived between the wars in Germany and France, writing as by V Sirin; he emigrated to the USA in 1940 – at which point he began to write in English rather than Russian (he had been an accomplished translator from English into Russian for some years) – and from 1959 lived in Switzerland. His first books of poetry date from the teens of the ...
Potter, David
(1874-1962) US naval officer and author who published nonfiction and sentimental novels under his own name and, pseudonymously, a Lost Race novel, The Lost Goddess (1908) as by Edward Barron, in which a beautiful descendant of the Mayans proves to come from a mysterious Island up a great South American river, where some of her folk have survived. [JC]
Okorafor, Nnedi
Working name of US academic and author Nnedimma Okorafor-Mbachu (1974- ), whose Igbo parents had emigrated to America in 1969 but from her early childhood often returned with her to Nigeria, a complex upbringing reflected throughout her writing career; she began to publish work of genre interest with "The Palm Tree Bandit", in Strange Horizons for 11 December 2000. From the first, her work has interwoven traditional sf topoi with ...
Shelton, Greg
(? - ) US author of an sf novel, Chasing the Cosmic Wind (1999), in which a ship carrying Aliens crashes into the Pacific; by a process of Identity Transfer, the aliens take over the minds of seven swimmers. As the tale progresses, interspecies relationships (see First Contact; Sex) begin to develop. [JC]
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 ...