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Thursday 16 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.
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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 ...
Ōrai Noriyoshi
(1935-2015) Japanese artist who has occasionally worked in the Anime field on storyboards and image boards, although he is chiefly known for book covers and internal Illustration, particularly during the 1980s. His Seiun Award seems to have been conferred upon him largely for his striking work on the Japanese poster for ...
Moran, Richard
(1942-2009) US author whose Near Future Disaster thrillers – beginning with Cold Sea Rising (1986), in which volcanic action melts the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic – usually import Technothriller elements into their storylines, giving room for heroic action which turns the tables. Novels of this sort include Dallas Down (1988) and the Meade sequence ...
Ayreon
Heavy-metal prog-rock band founded by Dutch musician Arjen Anthony Lucassen (1960- ). The group's first album, The Final Experiment (1995) is a curious and rather lurid combination of Dark Age Arthuriana and futuristic apocalypse: scientists from the year 2084 send messages back in time (see Time Radio) to a fifth-century minstrel called Ayreon who then relays their doomy message in song. Actual Fantasy (1996) is ...
Rife, Robert
(? - ) US author of The Cool Thing: A Dark Comedy. Or Not (2021), a moderately spoofish sf thriller whose protagonist – purchasing in error a relic from a crashed Alien Spaceship which turns out to be a kind of matter transmitter (see Matter Transmission) – is briefly entrapped in a Mad Scientist's ...
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 ...