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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 ...
Tearne, Roma
(1954- ) Sri Lankan-born painter and author, in UK from 1964; most of her fiction is nonfantastic, her first two novels, Mosquito (2007) and Bone China (2008) in particular focusing on the land of her birth. The sense of loss and irretrievable distance that mark these tales also governs, from a different line of sight, her sf novel The White City (2017), set in a Near Future ...
Foreman, Russell
(1921-2000) Australian author of a Near Future Disaster novel, The Ringway Virus (1976), in which a virus-based Pandemic 100% fatal to humans threatens to terminate the species; there is some small chance that isolated breeding couples will survive. [JC]
Smith, William Wye
(1827-1917) UK-born minister, teacher, journalist, poet and author, in Canada from the age of ten, active as a poet from 1850. He is of sf interest for Vetulia: or, Going to the Bottom of Things (first version August 1875 New Dominion Monthly as "First Visit to Vetulia"; full text 1880 Advertiser: rev 1891), a Utopia whose social structure is shaped around the Immortality of its inhabitants. The long ...
Daniel, Tony
(1963- ) US author who began publishing sf with "For the Killed Astronauts" in Asimov's for December 1990, and who has been fairly prolific in the 1990s. His first novel, Warpath (June 1991 Asimov's as "Candle"; exp 1993), was admired for its ambitious scope, though it is overloaded with material, and slides (at points uncontrolledly) from sf to Magic Realism to myth ...
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 ...