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Monday 20 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 ...
Schutz, Heinrich
(1888-1945) German biologist and author of Der sterbende Gletscher ["The Dying Glacier"] (1928; trans Frank Barnes as When Mammoths Roamed the Frozen Earth 1929), a Prehistoric SF tale describing in melodramatic terms the end of the last Ice Age, with mammoths and other stranger Monsters battling each other for food, and a Lost Race. Schutz's ...
Jetta
US Comic (1952-1953). Three issues (numbered #5-#7). Standard Magazines, Inc. Artists Dan DeCarlo, Fred Eng and Joe Edwards; scripts by Joe Archibald and Dixon Wells. Each issue had five strips (though one was only a page or two) and one two-page text story. / With the popularity of Archie Comics – about the life of normal American teenager Archie Andrews and his friends in the town of Riverdale – it is not surprising that other comics appeared ...
Behemoth, the Sea Monster
Film (1959; vt The Giant Behemoth US). Diamond/Allied Artists. Directors Douglas Hickox, Eugène Lourié. Written by Lourié. Cast includes Gene Evans, Jack MacGowran, Leigh Madison and André Morell. 80 minutes, cut to 72 minutes. Black and white. / Lourié made several Monster Movies during his career, including The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms ...
Coward, Noël
(1899-1973) UK actor, poet, composer, playwright and author, who performed professionally on the stage from 1911 and in films from 1917; after some apprentice work beginning in 1917, his first successfully produced play I'll Leave It To You (performed 1920; 1920 chap) was followed by dozens of successful comedic satires over the next decades. He did not often engage in the fantastic as a dramatist (and never as a fiction writer), though his anti-war play, ...
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 ...