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Wednesday 15 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 ...
Savage, Richard
Pseudonym of UK author Ivan Roe (1917-1976) for his thrillers – including The Horrible Hat (1949), in which a psychoanalyst/detective explains strange manifestations – and his sf novel, When the Moon Died: A Modern Novel of Science and Imagination (1955), whose telling involves an exceedingly complicated frame: far-future Aliens visit a dead Earth to listen to a tape whose long-dead narrator has discovered how, long before, a ...
Found Footage
A term infelicitously but irreversibly appropriated since 1999 to denote fictional feature films, particularly in Horror genres, which emulate venerable epistolary and documentary modes of textuality by using elements of non-fiction film form and simulated amateur-video footage. (Previously the term had marked a class of documentary film distinguished by the incorporation of archive and amateur footage into an assembled feature with or without commentary, a ...
Burgess, Eric
(1912-1995) UK author, always in collaboration with Arthur Friggens, of several sf novels for Robert Hale Limited, none being remarkable in content. Anti-Zota (1973) revolves around conflict between the short-lived and the long-lived (see Immortality) in the Far Future. Arguably the Mortorio books – Mortorio (1973) ...
Luchador
["Fighter/Wrestler"] Mexican subgenre of Cinema featuring masked wrestlers (luchadors or luchadores) as crime-fighting Superheroes; the subgenre is also known as lucha libre, for the Mexican sport of freestyle wrestling. As with other masked and costumed Superheroes lacking actual Superpowers beyond unusual strength and resilience ( ...
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 ...