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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 ...
Snyder, Cecil III
(1948- ) US author of The Hawks of Arcturus (1974), in which a lone Earthman defies the eponymous Aliens in their attempt to find the secrets of an ancient Galaxy-ruling race (see Forerunners). He should not be confused with his father, Cecil K Snyder Jr (1927- ), also an author. [JC]
Thompson, Tade
(1970s- ) UK psychiatrist and author, in Nigeria from around 1976 to 1998; his forename is pronounced Tar-Day. He began publishing work of genre interest with "The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds" in Ideomancer for September 2005, set in a post-Invasion London. His first novel, Making Wolf (2015), which won a Kitschies Golden Tentacle ...
Dvorkin, David
(1943- ) UK-born author, long in the USA, father of Daniel Dvorkin; first novel of strong interest, after the unremarkable The Children of Shiny Mountain (1977; vt Shiny Mountain 1978) and The Green God (1979), was Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983). This Recursive tale takes the detective Sherlock Holmes, who has ...
Hantke, Steffen
(1962- ) German academic, MA and PhD in American Studies at Philipps University, Marburg, with a professional life in the US 1989-2003 and subsequently in South Korea. He began to publish genre-related articles in academic journals in the mid-1990s, first primarily on writers associated with the fantastic ranging from Kathe Koja and Michael Blumlein to Jack O'Connell and Geoff ...
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 ...