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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 ...
Swyler, Erika
(1975- ) US playwright and author whose Book of Speculation sequence beginning with The Book of Speculation (2015) which, in a manner evocative of James P Blaylock's exercises in Pacific-Rim Magic Realism, Equipoises a fantasy-based tale of doom attending an old house half-awash in the rising seas of Long Island (New York), with hints that ...
Barker, Thomas W
(? - ) US author of one sf novel, Five for Infinity (1976), whose multiple protagonists find that they and their Spaceship have inadvertently exceeded the speed of light (see Faster Than Light; Relativity), and find themselves in peril. [JC]
Applin, Arthur
(1873-1949) UK aviator in World War One, playwright and author whose Near Future sf tale, The Priest of Piccadilly (1910) offers the worry that Britain might be taken over through a revolution fomented by a demagogue. [JC]
Walling, William
(1926-2021) US aerospace engineer, technical writer and fiction author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Rings on her Fingers" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for September 1970; further stories followed in the same magazine, in Galaxy and in Analog. In his first sf novel, No One Goes There Now (1971), a distorted human culture on a colony planet (see ...
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 ...