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Wednesday 22 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.
Site updated on 20 April 2026
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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 ...
Woodring, Jim
(1952- ) American cartoonist, Comic book artist and author. Prone to hallucinations when young, Woodring dropped out of college and after a stint as a garbage collector joined Ruby-Spears Productions as an animator, working on such low-quality shows as Rubik the Amazing Cube (1983) (see Hanna-Barbera) and Turbo Teen (1984-1985), about a teenager who could transform into a sports car. ...
Cobb, James H
(1953-2014) US author in whose Technothriller, Choosers of the Slain (1996), a stealth destroyer full of Inventions, and captained by a woman Commander perhaps supernaturally attuned to her ship, is pitted against an Argentinian attempt to claim the whole of Antarctica; further novels in the Amanda Garrett sequence hover within the same quasi-sf environment. The sf singleton Cibola (2004), set in ...
Davenport, Benjamin Rush
(? -? ) US author, quite possibly a resident of Cleveland, Ohio, whose "Uncle Sam's" Cabins: A Story of American Life, Looking Forward a Century (1895) initially depicts a Near Future so biased toward capitalists that most Americans have become serfs; a Pandemic (see also Disaster) eventually gives a reformer the chance to create a more equitable ...
Pirates of 1920, The
UK silent film (1911). Cricks & Martin Films. Directed by David Aylott and A E Coleby. Cast unknown. 21 minutes. Black and white. / In the then Near Future of 1920, pirates descend from their Airship on rope ladders, boarding an ocean-going ship and stealing the gold bullion it carries. As they leave, ship's officer Jack Manley grabs the ladder as it is being raised – a fortunate act, as the pirates now drop bombs ...
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 ...