SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Oshii Mamoru
(1951- ) Japanese director, scriptwriter, animator and author. Joining Tatsunoko Productions in 1977 as an Anime storyboard artist, Oshii worked on such shows as Time Bokan (1975-1976; vt Timefighters; vt Timefighters in the Land of Fantasy; 61 episodes) about the search for a Scientist lost whilst testing his insect-shaped ...
Boy and His Dog, A
Film (1975). LQJaf Productions. Directed by L Q Jones. Written by Jones and Moore, based on "A Boy and His Dog" (April 1969 New Worlds) by Harlan Ellison, who began but found himself unable to complete the script. Cast includes Susanne Benton, Don Johnson, Tim McIntire (as the dog's voice), Alvy Moore and Jason Robards. 91 minutes. Colour. / Set in 2024 CE, Post-Holocaust, this ...
Superheroes
Superhero fiction is a genre based on many early models, but which crystallized in Comics; since then it has infiltrated the Cinema, Radio, Television and books. Stories involving figures with super (or at the least extraordinary) powers, and whose actions tend to keep the world safe, almost certainly existed, in some form, before Alexandre Dumas ...
Wasteland
Videogame (1988). Interplay Productions. Designed by Alan Pavlish, Michael A Stackpole, Ken St Andre. Platforms: AppleII, C64, DOS. / Wasteland is a Computer Role Playing Game, played in a two-dimensional overhead view and set in the twenty-first-century Nevada desert, many years after an apocalyptic nuclear war. This milieu has a similar flavour to the future ...
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 ...