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Tuesday 21 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
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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 ...
Seven Days
US tv series (1998-2001; vt 7 Days). Paramount Network Television Productions for the UPN network. Created by Christopher and Zachary Crowe. Directors include Charles Correll, David Livingston and John McPherson. Writers include Stephen Beck, Harry Cason and Tim Finch. Cast includes Don Franklin, Jonathan LaPaglia and Justina Vail. 66 45-minute episodes. Colour. / The Backstep Project is a secret National Security Agency Time Travel project ...
Wickham, Harvey
(1872-1930) US pianist, religious apologist, and author; his Realpolitik defense of Mussolini, on the grounds that he would protect the Roman Catholic Church, diminished his posthumous reputation; nor did his attacks on authors of "smut" like D H Lawrence, also from a conservative religious point of view, did much to maintain interest in his work. Among his novels, which were written earlier, of sf interest is Jungle Terror (1920), a thriller set in South America, featuring flying ...
Hori Akira
(1944- ) Japanese author known for several Fixup collections of linked stories, whose sole novel to date won a 1989 Seiun Award amid controversial circumstances. After almost a decade in Japanese Fanzines, Hori's professional debut came with "Icarus no Tsubasa" ["The Wings of Icarus"] (1971 {SF Magazine}), swiftly establishing him as a hard-science thinker with ...
Smith, Nicholas Sansbury
(1983- ) US author whose several series have generally focused on Near Future Holocausts and/or Disasters, the first of these being the Orbs sequence beginning with Orbs (2013), where it is decided that Ecologically ravished Earth must be abandoned, but the overnight wiping-out by Aliens of almost every ...
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 ...