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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 ...
Wentworth, Walter
(? -? ) UK author of interest for his children's sf Kibboo Ganey sequence, comprising Kibboo Ganey; Or, the Lost Chief of the Copper Mountain (1889) and The Drifting Island (1890) [for both books see Checklist below for full titles]. An elderly but competent Colonel, member of the Royal Geographical Society, takes his son and nephew to Africa, where they untether a floating peninsula to create an ...
Talking Heads
US rock band formed in New York in 1975 by vocalist and guitarist David Byrne (1952- ), guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison (1949- ), bassist Tina Weymouth (1950- ) and drummer Chris Frantz (1951- ); active until 1991. Their tight funk-inflected pop-rock, with innovative use of what was at the time called "world music" (particularly African) elements, has proven enduringly influential. "Life During ...
Piercy, Marge
(1936- ) US author who has become recognized as a significant voice of US Feminism, initially with Poetry in volumes like Breaking Camp (coll 1968) but more importantly in novels like Going Down Fast (1969) and Vida (1980). Her first sf novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), deals with an attempt by a group of student revolutionaries to set up a loving, ...
Cannell, Stephen J
(1941-2010) US television producer, actor and scriptwriter, prolific in all these areas, much involved over the years in various manifestations of The Rockford Files; some of his work is horror. Of his fiction, mostly detective thrillers, Final Victim: A Novel (1996) is a noirish Near Future sf tale in which Cyberspace is inhabited by both a killer with a telegenic personality disorder, and by the team of ...
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 ...