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Saturday 11 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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Marriott Watson, H B
(1863-1921) Australian-born editor and author, in New Zealand 1873-1885, afterwards in the UK; the son of Henry Crocker Marriott Watson. His family surname was simply Watson, but both he and his father used the fuller name in honour of the distinguished Marriott family, with whom a relationship was claimed. Although some of his stories, assembled conveniently in The Devil of the Marsh; and Other Stories (coll 2004) edited by James ...
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
Term used to describe a form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game with gameplay resembling that of a Computer Role Playing Game. Players create characters with abilities distinct from those of their makers, and use them to explore a shared fictional world and cooperate or compete with each other to fight the enemies they find there. MMORPGs differ from ...
Roche, Eugenius
(1780/1786-1829) Either a French-born author in the UK from his late teens, or (slightly less likely) an Irish-born writer raised in France and in the UK from his early twenties; in any case, his career in London as journalist and playwright was financially disastrous, litigious, and he left many children in extreme poverty after his early death. The long title poem of his posthumous London in a Thousand Years (coll 1830), is a contemplation, in the mode of the ...
Wise, David
(1930-2018) US author and journalist, with the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, whose works include both fiction and nonfiction about espionage and US politics. Of sf interest is The Samarkand Dimension (1987), a spy thriller in which Soviet sabotage of a US ICBM launch test has disastrous results and is ascribed to Psi Powers, the enemy having overridden the course controls via Telekinesis. The ...
Green, Roger Lancelyn
(1918-1987) UK scholar, critic, translator (from classical Greek) and author, with a special interest in Fantasy, much of his fiction comprising retellings of traditional material for young readers. Tellers of Tales (1948) [for expansions of this title see Checklist below] is an invaluable early companion to this literature. He was a member of the Inklings group, and among his many works those most relevant to sf studies ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...