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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.
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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 ...
Dr No
Film (1962). Eon/United Artists. Directed by Terence Young. Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, Berkely Mather, based on Dr No (1958) by Ian Fleming. Cast includes Ursula Andress, Sean Connery, Jack Lord and Joseph Wiseman. 105 minutes. Colour. / This UK film was the first in the hugely successful James Bond series, at first loosely based on Fleming's novels and later featuring original stories. The villain, whose ...
Piziks, Steven
(1967- ) US author, who also writes as by Steven Harper, and who began publishing work of genre interest with "Hoard" in Sword and Sorcerers IX (anth 1992) edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. He is noted in particular for two series: the In the Company of Mind sequence comprising In the Company of Mind (1998) and Corporate Mentality (1999), whose young protagonist, in a universe ...
Moore, M Louise
(? -? ) US author who, with M Beauchamp, self-published anonymously a Hollow Earth tale, Al-Modad; Or, Life Scenes Beyond the Polar Circumflex: A Religio-Scientific Solution of Problems of Present and Future Life, by an Untrammeled Free-Thinker (1892), in which Al-Modad and a companion arrive in a subterranean Lost World under the Arctic, which they find to be a ...
Ertz, Susan
(1887-1985) UK author of popular novels, very probably pseudonymous, active for much of the century and perhaps now most famous for one quote from her novel Anger in the Sky (1943): "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Her Scientific Romance, Woman Alive (1935), borrows wholesale from John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain ...
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 ...