SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Questar
US magazine; letter-size and on Slick paper; 13 issues, Spring 1978 to October 1981; published by M W Communications Inc (William G Wilson and Robert V Michelucci), Pittsburgh; edited by William G Wilson Jr except for #12 (June 1981), edited by Paul D Adomites. The final, redesigned issue, had a new title: Quest/Star, subtitled "The World of Science Fiction". / Questar began as a media Semiprozine largely devoted to ...
Colossus, the Forbin Project
Film (1969; vt The Forbin Project). Universal. Directed by Joseph Sargent. Written by James Bridges, based on Colossus (1966) by D F Jones. Cast includes Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Paul Frees (uncredited) Gordon Pinsent and William Schallert. 100 minutes. Colour. / A supercomputer, Colossus, is designed by Dr Charles Forbin (Braeden) to take control of the US defence network. After being activated and lauded by the President ...
Slaughterhouse-Five
Film (1972). Vanadas/Universal. Directed by George Roy Hill. Written by Stephen Geller, based on Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Cast includes Sharon Gans, Ron Leibman, Valerie Perrine, Eugene Roche and Michael Sacks. 104 minutes. Colour. / A middle-class, middle-aged American (Sacks), dissatisfied with his job, marriage and life in general, starts to experience sudden shifts in time, mainly ...
Barrett, William E
(1900-1986) US amateur pilot and author, many of whose stories were nonfantastic recounts of World War One combat; he had published Flight from Youth (1939) before the war, later incorporating it into The Edge of Things (coll 1960), whose three stories all relate in some way to flying. Much earlier, he began publishing short stories with "The Music of Madness" for Weird Tales, March 1926. His sf novel, The Fools of Time ...
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 (1966-1967), and later in ...