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Friday 17 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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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 ...
Langelaan, George
(1908-1972) French-born UK author and journalist, an intelligence agent in World War Two (underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance), active for many years in the USA before returning to France; his first work of genre interest in English became his most famous story, "The Fly" (June 1957 Playboy), the macabre tale of an unsuccessful experiment in Matter Transmission in which the hapless ...
Piece of Phantasmagoria, A
Japanese animated tv series (1995). Original title Phantasmagoria. Shigeru Tamura Studio. Directed and written by Shigeru Tamura. Fifteen five-minute episodes. Colour. / A series of fifteen shorts each ending with its narrator explaining how, whilst travelling the realm of dreams, they discovered the little planet Phantasmagoria, from which the story comes (see Life on Other Worlds). They are usually ...
Ruskin, Ronald
(1944- ) Canadian medical doctor and author whose The Last Panic (1979), a Near Future tale in which a sudden Pandemic drives nearly everyone insane. [JC]
Zeta One
UK film (1969; vt The Love Slaves; vt Alien Women; vt The Love Factor). Tigon British Film Productions. Directed by Michael Cort. Written by Cort and Alistair McKenzie. Cast includes Dawn Addams, Anna Gaël, Robin Hawdon, Charles Hawtrey, James Robertson Justice, Wendy Lingham and Yutte Stensgaard. 86 minutes. Colour. / Spy James Word (Hawdon) seduces (or is seduced by) his boss's secretary, Ann Olsen (Stensgaard), and reveals to her the secret of the ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...