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Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
Thunderbirds
UK animated-puppet tv series (1965-1966). An AP Films Production for ATV/ITC. Created by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson. Produced by Gerry Anderson (season 1), Reg Hill (season 2). Writers included Dennis Spooner, Alan Fennell, Alan Pattillo. Directors included David Lane, David Elliott, Desmond Saunders, Pattillo. Model effects supervised by Derek Meddings. 2 seasons, 32 50-minute episodes (re-edited in the USA ...
Roberts, J W
(1824-1900) US newspaper publisher and author of Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893), a Dystopia designed as its subtitle indicates to rebut Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1888 (1888). The rich young protagonist, with the aid of a scientist whose potion puts him into Suspended Animation for a several ...
Beresford, Leslie
Principal pseudonym – adopted circa 1910 – of UK author Charles Beresford Painter (1878-1946), who has been inaccurately listed as having published "A Story of Horseshoes" for Short Stories (week ending 12 March 1898) as by Pan – but who in fact began his publishing career with The Second Rising: A Romance of India (1910), a Future War novel about the Second Indian Mutiny. Two Utopian ...
Oyeyemi, Helen
(1984- ) Nigerian-born author, in the UK from infancy, latterly in Prague; none of her works could easily be called sf, even in the understanding sense that much twenty-first century work are tales that contain sf within the unruly water margins of Fantastika as a whole. It seems clear, however, that her fabulations, with their interlacings of African and British locations and modes of telling, seem instinct with fantastika. / ...
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 ...