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Sunday 19 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 ...
Amazing Stories Quarterly
US letter-size Magazine, companion to Amazing (but twice as thick) and successor to Amazing Stories Annual. 22 issues, Winter 1928-Fall 1934, first under the aegis of Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company and later (1929-1934), edited by T O'Conor Sloane after Gernsback had lost control, under the various ...
China Syndrome, The
Film (1979). IPC Films. Directed by James Bridges. Written by Mike Gray, T S Cook, Bridges. Cast includes Wilford Brimley, Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. 122 minutes. Colour. / Made by the production company with which Jane Fonda was associated (Indochina Peace Campaign), this is the first of two crusading borderline-sf films starring her, the other being Rollover (1981). Here she plays a television reporter hoping to do more "hard" ...
Martin, J P
(1879-1966) UK author, a Methodist minister from 1902; he carried out missionary work in South Africa and was a chaplain in World War One, thereafter remaining in England. His popular Uncle sequence of absurdist children's stories – with, it proved, lasting appeal to adults – comprises Uncle (written 1934; 1964), Uncle Cleans Up (1965), Uncle and His Detective (1966), ...
Davis, Frederick C
(1902-1977) US author of pulp fiction, sometimes under pseudonyms, from 1922 or earlier. He published detective fiction in book form from the mid-1930s until the end of his active career in the late 1960s. His most interesting early work of sf interest – mainly through explanations of the one-way Moon-shaped glass helmet worn as a disguise by the crimebusting hero – was the Moon Man sequence, 39 novellas published from 1933 to 1937 in Ten Detective Aces. After the ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...