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Saturday 18 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 ...
Kamishibai
["Paper Theatre"] Although there has been a scroll-based story-telling tradition in Japan since the 12th century, for our purposes the kamishibai medium was a spin-off that flourished between the 1920s and the 1950s, spanning the Depression era, the peak of Japanese Imperialism, and the American postwar Occupation. / A kamishibai was a frame mounted on the back of a bicycle, coincidentally equivalent in dimensions to a ...
Sinclair, Clive
(1948-2018) UK author best known for his first novel, Bibliosexuality (1973), which not quite fantastically describes a neurotic condition involving sexual intimacy with books, as conveyed through an ultimately indecipherable narrative liaison between the author and the conveyor or victim of excessive bibliophily (see Jorge Luis Borges; Postmodernism and SF). Hearts of Gold (coll 1979) ...
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de
(1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). He wrote much, and one of his most important books became a seminal influence on Proto SF: Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686; exp 1687; trans Sir W D Knight as A Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds 1687; new trans Aphra Behn as ...
Hilliard, John Northern
(1873-1935) US reporter, press agent and author, best known for his work on stage magic, including the posthumous Greater Magic (1938); he was probably the ghostwriter of The Art of Magic (1909) as by T Nelson Downs (1867-1938). He is of some sf interest for his collaboration with Grace Sartwell Mason (whom see), The Bear's Claws (1913) [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 ...