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Sunday 19 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 ...
Westlake, Michael
(1942- ) UK author and editor, much of whose work has been in film studies. One Zero and the Night Controller (1980) is a Fabulation in which a taxi driver tracks down an occult nocturnal mystery; Imaginary Women (1987) plays with questions of Perception as conveyed through the hallucinations of film; and in 51 Soko: To the Islands on the Other Side of the World (1990) ...
Aelita
Film (1924). Mezhrabpom. Directed by Yakov A Protazanov. Written be Fyodor Otzep, Alexei Faiko, based on Aelita (1922) by Alexei Tolstoy. Cast includes Igor Ilinski, Yulia Solntseva and Nikolai M Tseretelli. 78 minutes cut from 120 minutes. Black and white. / This striking example of early sf Cinema is a satiric comedy in which a group of Soviet astronauts travel to Mars, where they ...
Flight of the Navigator
Film (1986). Producers Sales/New Star Entertainment/Walt Disney. Directed by Randal Kleiser. Written by Michael Burton, Matt MacManus, based on a story by Mark H Baker. Cast includes Veronica Cartwright, Joey Cramer, Cliff De Young, Howard Hesseman and Paul Mall. 89 minutes. Colour. / Made for children, this might – one would think – be rather disturbing for them. A 12-year-old (Cramer) returns home after a fall and finds the wrong people living there. The police take him ...
Ballantine Books
US publishing company founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine (1916-1995), who had previously helped found Bantam Books, and his wife Betty Ballantine (1919-2019); in 2002 Betty Ballantine received an SFWA President's Award to honour the fruits of their long career. For the first six months, at the beginning of that career, they ran Ballantine Books from their apartment. Although it was a general publisher, an important priority was the ...
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 ...