SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 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 7 July 2026
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Ritt, William
(1901-1972) US cartoonist and author, whose best known Comic strip, Brick Bradford, is Space Opera (for details see entry on the strip). The strip's first two storylines were revised as two Big Little Books: Brick Bradford and the City Beneath the Sea (1933-1934 Brick Bradford; rev graph 1934) and ...
RoboCop
1. Film (1987). Orion. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Michael Miner, Edward Neumeier. Cast includes Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Robert DoQui, Miguel Ferrer, Daniel O'Herlihy, Kurtwood Smith and Peter Weller. 102 minutes. (Director's cut 103 minutes.) Colour. / In a Near Future Dystopian Detroit – almost as though RoboCop's makers were aware that the automobile ...
Hiller, B B
Working name of US author Barbara B Hiller (1946- ), who as Bonnie Bryant has written a large number of Young Adult novels, almost all of them set in venues like Dude Ranches, where romance and adventures flourish. As Hiller, she wrote several "pick-your-own-plot" titles, like Camp-Out on Danger Mountain (1984 chap), a Twist-a-Plot tale and two associated Pick-a-Plot narrative projects, some of these with her ...
Watson, Robert
(1882-1948) Scottish-born screenwriter, editor and author, in Canada from 1908, moving to California in 1933 to continue his cinema work. Of his several romantic adventures, High Hazard: A Romance of the Far Arctic (1929) is a Lost World tale featuring a clement enclave in the far north, where creatures out of Prehistoric SF roam, along with giants. [JC]
Small Presses and Limited Editions
Any firm founded to release work of personal interest to the publisher, and which distributes that work to readers whose interest can also be assumed, may be called a small press. Four years before Hugo Gernsback began Amazing Stories in 1926, The Lunar Publishing Company of Providence, Kentucky, was founded by friends of the author of the book it had been created in order to publish – and then folded. ...
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 ...