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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.
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 ...
Gilliland, Alexis A
(1931- ) US cartoonist and author who won Hugos as Best Fan Artist in 1980, 1983, 1984 and 1985; he also won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 1982. As an official in the US Federal Government 1956-1982, serving mainly as a chemist and specification writer, Gilliland was well situated to spoof bureaucracy, though his first sf sequence – the Rosinante trilogy comprising ...
Royer, Amber
(? - ) US teacher, librarian and author, who is of sf interest for her Chocoverse sequence beginning with the spoofish Free Chocolate (2018), based on the morally untasty premise that, in the very distant Near Future, planet Earth's only saleable resource in the galaxy will be chocolate, and that trade in pure uncut cocoa will be on the lines of the kind of drug cartels familiar in the twenty-first ...
Jaeger, Muriel
(1892-1969) UK author who took an English degree at Oxford and was a member there of a group of women writers, including Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957), which called itself the Mutual Admiration Society. Her first sf work, The Question Mark (1926), depicts a Utopian UK of 200 years hence – as witnessed by the protagonist, who has been roused from a cataleptic trance (see Sleeper Awakes) – is a ...
Gordon, Ariel
(? - ) Canadian poet and author of a Young Adult sf novel, Blood Letters (2025) with G M B Chomichuk (for details see that entry). [JC] Ariel Gordon born Winnipeg, Manitoba / Blood Letters (Winnipeg, Manitoba: ...
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 ...