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Wednesday 15 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 ...
Jakober, Marie
(1941-2017) Canadian author whose only sf novel, The Mind Gods: A Novel of the Future (1976), is set on a colony planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) where a materialist, tolerant society confronts a repellent spiritual creed (see Religion). With some subtlety the outcome is shown to be not altogether, morally, on the side of the liberals. Jakover's later books of genre ...
Dystopias
The word "dystopia" is the commonly used antonym of "eutopia" (see Utopias) and denotes that class of hypothetical societies containing images of worlds worse than our own. An early user of the term was John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), in a parliamentary speech in 1868, but its recent fashionableness probably stems from its use in Quest for Utopia (1952) by Glenn Negley (1907-1988) and J Max Patrick (1908-? ). Anthony ...
Olan, Susan Torian
(1947-1999) US author whose The Earth Remembers (1990) is a cagily written example of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety of Post-Holocaust fiction. Taking the form of a Western set along the Texas-Mexico border, the tale features Mutants, Amerindians and nuclear devices along with the usual protagonists and antagonists. [JC]
Thompson, William Irwin
(1938-2020) US poet, cultural critic and author, founder of the Lindisfarne Association in 1972, which he led until it became inactive in 2012. Within its ecumenical spiritual mission could be detected some evidence (James Lovelock being a member) of a commitment to the concept of Gaia, which Thompson advocates in The nonfiction Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (1989). Of sf interest is ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...