SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
After Earth
US film (2013). Columbia/Overbrook Entertainment/Blinding Edge Pictures. Directed by M Night Shyamalan. Written by Gary Whitta and M Night Shyamalan, based on a story by Will Smith. Cast includes Kristofer Hivju, Zoë Isabella Kravitz, Glenn Morshower, Sophie Okonedo, Jaden Smith and Will Smith. 100 minutes. Colour. / One thousand years in the future, humanity has abandoned Earth to live on another planet after ...
Sleeper
Film (1973). Rollins-Joffe Productions/United Artists. Directed by Woody Allen. Written by Allen, Marshall Brickman. Cast includes Allen, John Beck, Mary Gregory, Diane Keaton and Don Keefer. 88 minutes. Colour. / The plot device of having a man from the present suddenly finding himself in the future (this time through Cryonics) is nearly always used to comment on contemporary society rather than to speculate about the future (see ...
Gardner, Gilson
(1869-1935) US author of A New Robinson Crusoe: A New Version of his Life and Adventures, With an Explanatory Note (1920), an updating of various Robinsonade tropes; the protagonist is becomes a castaway due to a plane crash; there are hints of Inventions in the air, which edge the text into sf. [JC]
Video Watchdog
US saddle-stapled Digest-size Cinema magazine. Published and edited by Donna and Tim Lucas. Summer 1990-2016. A bimonthly schedule was generally adhered to. / The heart of Video Watchdog as a Media Magazine was from the first its extended reviews of film and Television releases in video or, subsequently, DVD and other formats; existing films or television in ...
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 ...