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
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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 ...
Mad
US Magazine (1952-current) initially published by EC Comics, which debuted as a full-colour Comic book before shifting to a black-and-white magazine format in 1955 so that publisher William Gaines could evade the oversight of the newly created Comics Code Authority. It has always specialized in good-natured Satire aimed at a wide variety of targets. Since 2018 its publication has ...
Rosny aîné, J-H
Principal pseudonym of French-speaking Belgian author Joseph-Henri-HonoréBoëx (1856-1940), in the UK 1875-1884, subsequently in France. He initially signed this name simply J-H Rosny, without an indication of seniority ("aîné" meaning "elder"), and shared this form of the pseudonym with his younger brother Justin; some works published as by J-H Rosny during that period, none of them sf, are collaborative. After 1907, when the brothers separated, the name was divided, ...
Lunts, Lev N
(1901-1924) Russian playwright, critic, translator and author, founder of the Serapion Brothers, a group of experimentalist authors, whose name he took from E T A Hoffmann's collection of that name. He is of specific sf interest for The City of Truth (trans John Silver from manuscript 1929), in which a surreal search by soldiers for the heart of Mother Russia deposits them in a Utopian City ...
Kinross, Albert
(1870-1929) UK soldier, editor, journalist and author in various genres, in active service as a journalist on the front lines during World War One; of sf interest for The Fearsome Island [for descriptive subtitle see Checklist below] (1896). The recently discovered manuscript of a shipwrecked sixteenth-century adventurer describes in supernatural terms his experiences on a mysterious Island in the Antilles full of ...
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 ...