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Saturday 8 November 2025
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 4 November 2025
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Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Ballantine Books
US publishing company founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine (1916-1995), who had previously helped found Bantam Books, and his wife Betty Ballantine (1919-2019); in 2002 Betty Ballantine received an SFWA President's Award to honour the fruits of their long career. For the first six months, at the beginning of that career, they ran Ballantine Books from their apartment. Although it was a general publisher, an important priority was the ...
Smith, William Augustus
(? -? ) US author of His Pseudoic Majesty; Or, the Knights of the Fleece (1903), a Near Future novel whose sf underpinnings – in the main an idealized description of a hierarchical America free of the depredations of capitalism – are obscured by the allegorical recounting of the tale. [JC]
Moore, F Frankfort
(1855-1931) Irish journalist, playwright and author, active from 1875, some of whose eighty or more novels contain supernatural elements; his satires against the idea of Irish Home Rule are not fantastic. Tales of sf interest include The Secret of the Court: A Romance of Life and Death (1895), in which a vast Underground complex is discovered beneath contemporary Egypt, home of the remnants of an ancient Lost Race ...
Kippax, John
Pseudonym of UK author John Charles Hynam (1915-1974), a regular contributor to the UK sf magazines during 1955-1961, publishing over thirty stories in that time, only one under his own name; two appeared as by Julian Frey. Several Kippax stories appeared elsewhere, as did much generally non-genre material as by Hynam (John, Joan or Jane) or Frey. His first two stories appeared in December 1954: "Dimple" in Science Fantasy and "Trojan Hearse" in ...
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 ...