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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.
Site updated on 14 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 ...
Dold, Elliott
(1889-1957) US illustrator, son of noted psychiatrist William Elliott Dold (1856-1942) and younger brother of Douglas Dold. His birth year is often given as 1892, but 1889 has been confirmed. Dold studied art at the College of William and Mary in Virginia to 1912, and with his brother joined the Serbian army in 1915. Although his 44 Art Deco drawings for Harold Hersey's Night (1923) are perhaps his finest work, ...
Woops!
Tv series (1996). Witt/Thomas Productions with Touchstone Television for Fox Network. Created by Gary Jacobs. Produced by Drew Brown and Gil Junger. Directed by Terry Hughes. Writers include Ross Abrash, Harold Kimmel and Mark Nutter. Cast includes Fred Applegate, Lane Davies, Cleavant Derricks, Meagen Fay, Marita Geraghty, Evan Handler. 13 25-minute episodes. Colour. / Children playing with a remote-controlled toy car somehow cause the accidental launch of a nuclear missile which ...
Ebenbach, David
(1972- ) US academic, poet and author, active from around 2000; He began publishing work of genre interest with "Team Orderly Mars" in Not One of Us for October 2016, his earlier short stories, variously assembled, are nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for his third novel, How to Mars (early version May/June 2021 Analog; 2021), in which a cadre of scientists, on a publicity-shaped mission to Mars, ...
Taylor, Charles Henry
(1863-1950) US lawyer, entrepreneur and author of By Wireless from Venus (1922), a lightly fictionalized report, conveyed by radio Communications from Venus, describing life in the Solar System. Some civilizations are advanced Utopias but others are not. [JC]
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 ...