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Monday 6 July 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 6 July 2026
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Automan
US tv series (1983-1984). Glen A Larson Productions/The Kushner-Locke Company/20th Century Fox Television; ABC-TV US, BBC 1 UK. Created by Glen A Larson. Directors include Lee H Katzin, Winrich Kolbe, and Kim Manners. Writers include Sam Egan, Bruce Kalish, Larson, and Douglas Heyes, Jr. Cast includes Desi Arnaz Jr, Heather McNair, Gerald S O'Loughlin and Chuck Wagner. Narrator: uncredited. One 70-minute pilot film plus 13 50-minute episodes. / ...
Black, Frank Burne
(? -? ) Canadian author of The Chronicle of Kan-Uk the Kute [for subtitle see checklist below] (1918), a Satirical description of World War One, couched in quasi-Biblical cadences. The distortions in the spelling of names and places, and the explicit provenance given in the subtitle, make it clear that Kan-Uk has written down his tale at some point in the ...
Gilson, Charles
(1878-1943) UK soldier and author, who sometimes signed early books as Captain Charles Gilson and later publications as Major Charles Gilson, and whose tales for young male English readers are riddled with the class, racial and imperialist assumptions of his era. He is best known for fantasies like The Cat and the Curate: A Phenomenal Experience (1934), in which a Cat is transformed into a seductive Middle Eastern lady, and for ...
Idle, Eric
(1943- ) UK comedian, composer, actor, and author of a wide range of comic material, from skits for the famous UK Television series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) to the book and libretto for the play Monty Python's Spamalot (2005), and of two novels, the second of which, The Road to Mars: A Post-Modern Novel (1999), is sf featuring an ...
Maltese, William
Primary pseudonym of US author William J Lambert Jr (1944- ), most of whose work is erotica, some gay, some hetero; two of these are sf: the Tlen series comprising g Five Roads to Tlen (1970) and The Gods of Tlen (1970), both as William J Lambert, III, and Bond-Shattering (2005), the latter being a Space Opera in which relations between species are governed by a compelling aphrodisiac. The ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...