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Tuesday 14 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 ...
Marbo, Camille
Pseudonym of French journalist, editor and author Marguerite Appell Borel (1883-1969), awarded the Prix Femina in 1913 for her first novel, La Statue voilée ["The Veiled Statue"] (1913). In her sf novel, Le survivant (1918; trans Frank Hunter Potter as The Man Who Survived 1918), a soldier fatally wounded in the first days of World War One awakens to discover he has suffered ...
Monsters, Inc.
Animated film (2001). Walt Disney Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company), Pixar. Directed by Pete Docter, David Silverman and Lee Unkrich. Cast includes Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Billy Crystal, Mary Gibbs and John Goodman. Written by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson, based on a story by Docter, Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston. 88 minutes. Colour. / Why are all children scared of the door once the light is turned off at ...
Rolt-Wheeler, Francis W
Working name of UK author Francis William Wheeler (1876-1960), in US and Canada circa 1900-1925, later in Tunis and Nice; in his early career he specialized in stories for boys, though in his later years – after a spectacular 1915 divorce which led to his imprisonment – he turned to the kind of religious investigation, including forays into Theosophy, that characterized the career of his sister, Ethel Rolt Wheeler (1869-1958) (both siblings added ...
Iconoclasm
An essential part of sf is change; indeed it may be said that the belief that the circumstances of human life were bound to keep on changing provided the most powerful stimulus for the creation of the genre. Nevertheless, it is obvious from experience that all changes, technical or social, encounter resistance ranging from the perfunctory to the desperate, as a result of human inertia. Much sf, then, is concerned with the nature of that resistance, its unexpected force, the most efficacious ...
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 ...