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Monday 10 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 ...
Kohout, Pavel
(1928- ) Czech poet, playwright, author and, since his emigration in 1978, émigré activist; his relations with post-Communist Czech culture have not been easy, and he remains in Vienna. Though his early poetry had been pro-Communist, his politics changed and his work remained unpublished in Czechoslovakia in the period 1968-1989; some was published there in 1990. His sf novel, which deals with the political ...
Klainer, Albert S
(1935- ) US author of two sf novels in collaboration with his wife Jo-Ann Klainer, The Eleventh Plague (1973; typographical vt The 11th Plague 1976 as Albert S Klainer and Jo-Ann Klainer) as by L T Peters (see Pandemic), and The Judas Gene (1980) with Jo-Ann Klainer. Both mix Horror in SF and ...
Lofting, Hugh
(1886-1947) UK civil engineer and author, mostly in the USA from 1912, though he joined the Irish Guards in 1916, was severely wounded in 1917 and invalided out. It was during his period in the trenches that – like some other central creators of twentieth century fantasy, including J R R Tolkien, with first-hand experience of World War One – he began to create a fantasy universe, at least in part to sidestep a ...
Space Wars Heroes
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint. Published by Myron Fass as Stories, Layouts and Press. Editor: probably Jeffrey Goodman. Three bimonthly issues, 1979. / This Fass publication focused somewhat more heavily on Television than its stablemates, covering such programmes as Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) and The ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...