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Wednesday 15 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 ...
Wagner, Jane
(1935- ) US stage director, screenwriter and author, best known for her work in collaboration with her wife the stand-up comedian and actor Lily Tomlin (1939- ); of their work together, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (first performed 1985; 1986), filmed as The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1991) (see Theatre), is of sf interest, in particular ...
God Told Me To
Film (1976; vt Demon). Larco. Produced and directed by Larry Cohen. Written by Cohen. Cast includes Sandy Dennis, Tony Lo Bianco, Richard Lynch and Deborah Raffin. 89 minutes. Colour. / It is as well that Larry Cohen has his own production company, Larco, since it is impossible to imagine any other company taking on so eccentric a project. This is perhaps the most baroque sf movie ever made. A devout Catholic ...
Templeton, Charles
(1915-2001) Canadian newspaper editor, evangelist, broadcaster and author whose novels of sf interest were written long after he had lost his Christian faith. In Act of God (1977) the skeleton of Jesus of Nazareth is found, a discovery which disrupts the world's Christian Religions. A Near Future Utopia is falteringly created in World of One (1988), with evangelism exercising a ...
Mason, Douglas R
(1918-2013) UK junior-school headmaster and prolific author after 1964, both under his own name and as John Rankine (Rankine being his middle name); he was generally silent from about 1980 until his death, though some material was released or re-released in ebook form in 2003. His first story was "Two's Company" as by Rankine in John Carnell's New Writings in SF 1 (1964), and he was soon publishing two to three books a year, focusing under 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 ...