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Thursday 16 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 14 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 ...
Steele, Curtis
A House Name used by Popular Publications on the magazine Operator #5. From April 1934 to November 1935 Steele was Frederick C Davis, from December 1935 to March 1938 he was Emile Tepperman, and from then to the end in November/December 1939 he was Wayne Rogers. [PN/DRL]
Mercury
Mercury is the planet nearest the Sun, and hence is difficult to observe. Until the late nineteenth century it was believed to rotate on its axis every 24 hours or so, but this opinion was displaced by that of Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and Percival Lowell, who contended that it kept the same face permanently towards the Sun. Twentieth-century sf writers thus pictured it as having an extremely hot "dayside", a cold "nightside" ...
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Film (1991). Paramount. Directed by Nicholas Meyer. Written by Denny Martin Flinn, Meyer, based on a story by Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal. Cast includes the lead players from the Star Trek television series, along with Kim Cattrall, Rosana DeSoto, Christopher Plummer, Morgan Sheppard and David Warner. 109 minutes. Colour. / After the disaster of ...
Rimmer, Robert H
(1917-2001) US author who became famous with the Harrad sequence beginning with the nonfantastic The Harrad Experiment (1966), notable for its impassioned advocacy of Sex seen as almost always beneficial and liberating, regardless of the sexual orientation and number of partners involved; he also advocated less restrictive definitions of marriage, causing some of his readers in the sf field to associate his advocacies with those articulated by Robert ...
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 ...