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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 ...
Williams, Mark London
(1959- ) US playwright, journalist and author of whose various work the Young Adult Danger Boy sequence beginning with Ancient Fire (2001) is of sf interest. The young protagonist, son of the inventor whose Invention is a Time Machine, is forced by a combination of Time Travel and portal transfer into an ...
Strauss, Erwin S
(1948- ) US bibliographer active in Fandom, perhaps best known for a Fanzine published by him in various formats and titles since 1968, from 1979 to date as The Connection; as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Science Fiction Society, he compiled The Blackdex / The Bluedex (1965) with Marilyn Joyce Wisowaty, the basis for ...
Big Bus, The
Film (1976). Paramount Pictures. Produced by Lawrence J Cohen and Fred Freeman. Directed by James Frawley. Written by Cohen and Freeman. Cast includes John Beck, Joseph Bologna, Stockard Channing, José Ferrer, Ruth Gordon, Larry Hagman, Sally Kellerman and Stuart Margolin. 88 minutes. Colour. / The Cyclops, a nuclear-powered luxury double-decker bus equipped with bowling alleys and swimming pools and capable of holding 110 passengers along with its crew, departs on a ...
Brooks, Byron A
(1845-1911) US inventor (he invented the shift key for the typewriter) and author of Earth Revisited (1893), a Sleeper Awakes tale which espouses a somewhat garbled revision of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888); the reawakened protagonist, after falling in love with his nurse, realizes that she is the Reincarnation of a lost love. All ends well. [JC]
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...