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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Arbuthnot, John
(1667-1735) Scots physician (to Queen Anne and her royal family), mathematician, author and Satirist, a member of the Royal Society that was mocked by his friend Jonathan Swift in the third book of Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735); Arbuthnot is thought to have amiably provided suggestions and hints to improve this extended Parody, while preferring not to receive credit. His own ...
Byers, Sam
(1979- ) UK author whose first novel Idiopathy (2013), though not literally fantastic, engages in edge-of-the-present, extremely funny Satirical assaults on the British Media Landscape, and on the chatterati's morganatic relationship with the Internet in general. His second novel, Perfidious Albion (2018), moves his focus forward, into a post-Brexit ...
Quatermass II
1. UK tv serial (1955). BBC TV. Produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier. Written Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Monica Grey, Hugh Griffith, John Robinson and John Stone. Six 35-minute episodes. Black and white. / The sudden death of Reginald Tate, who played the lead in The Quatermass Experiment (1953), may account for some of the visible discomfort exuded by John Robinson, who replaced ...
Sissons, Michael
(1934-2018) UK literary agent from 1959 until his death, initially at the A D Peters agency which after a 1988 merger became Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD). In the early 1960s he edited three reprint Anthologies, that of greatest sf interest being Asleep in Armageddon: An Anthology of Science Fiction Stories (anth 1962), with tales by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Fredric ...
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 ...