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Friday 17 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 ...
Rountree, Josh
(1973- ) US author who sometimes writes under his full name Joshua Rountree, and who began to publish work of genre interest with "Fool's Tile" in Glyph for 15 December 2002. Much of his early work was assembled as Can't Buy Me Faded Love (coll 2007), with several tales placing various popular singer-songwriters and rock'n'roll performers into Alternate History worlds, rather after the fashion of Howard ...
Thought Experiment
In Physics, a thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment is a common means of exploring the implications of scientific assumptions without resorting to actual apparatus. Einstein's development of Relativity employed thought experiments about light signals exchanged between observers whose relative speed was a significant fraction of the speed of light, not easily attained by any real observer or (at that time) measuring device. The ...
Paranoia [game]
Role Playing Game (1984). West End Games (WEG). Designed by Greg Costikyan, Daniel Gelber, Ken Rolston, Eric Goldberg. / Playing Paranoia is an exercise in perversity and frustration, where the watchwords are "fear, ignorance and suspicion". The setting is a Post-Holocaust Underground City ruled by a ...
Noah
Film (2014). Paramount Pictures, Regency Enterprises, Protozoa Pictures. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Written by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel. Cast includes Douglas Booth, Leo McHugh Carroll, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe, Nolan Gross, Anthony Hopkins, Logan Leman, Mark Margolis, Nick Nolte and Ray Winstone. 138 minutes. Colour. / It would be overreaching to claim that Noah is an sf epic manqué about the Invention of a superior boat ...
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 ...