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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 ...
Morons from Outer Space
Film (1985). Directed by Mike Hodges. Written by Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith; developed by Bob Mercer. Cast includes Paul Bown, Griff Rhys Jones, Dinsdale Landen, Jimmy Nail, Joanne Pearce and Mel Smith. 97 minutes, cut to 91 minutes. Colour. / Very stupid Aliens (identical in appearance and behaviour to humans) have rented a Spaceship to go on holiday. They crashland on a UK motorway and later become media stars. This ...
Black Hole, The
Film (1979). Walt Disney (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by Gary Nelson. Written by Jeb Rosebrook, Gerry Day, based on a story by Rosebrook, Bob Barbash, Richard Landau. Cast includes Ernest Borgnine, Joseph Bottoms, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins and Maximilian Schell. 98 minutes. Colour. / The disappointment of its year in sf movies, this was a ludicrous though expensive reprise in space of Disney's ...
New Writings in SF
Original-Anthology series begun in 1964 by John Carnell after he relinquished the editorship of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, though planned several months before he announced his departure, when Carnell believed the day of the fiction magazine was over in Britain and the future was in the paperback book. The UK paperback editions (all published ...
Agnew, Ewan
(1893-1930) UK politician and playwright who was in active service during World War One, and who may have been blackballed from The Reform Club by E M Forster, but seems otherwise unnoted. In his sf play, The Shingling of Jupiter: A Fantastic Play for Serious People in Three Acts (1924 chap), Major Smith, a Mysterious Stranger from the eponymous planet who is on a spying ...
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 ...