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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.
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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 ...
McDonald, Steven E
(1956- ) UK author, now in the US, who began publishing sf with "Empty Barrels" in Analog for June 1978, his best-known story being "Ideologies" (October 1980 Analog), and whose first novel, The Janus Syndrome (1981), put into Space-Opera guise a tale involving racial oppression, romantic exaggerations of material, and masquerades. He then fell silent, though he has more ...
Santo the Silver Mask vs The Martian Invasion
Mexican film (1967). Original title Santo el Enmascarado de Plata vs "La Invasión de los Marcianos"; vt Santo the Silver-Masked Man vs The Martian Invasion. Producciones Cinematográficas. Directed by Alfredo B Crevenna. Written by Rafael García Travesi. Cast includes El Santo, Wolf Ruvinskis and Manuel Zozaya. 92 minutes. Black and white. / Over scenes of astronauts orbiting the Earth, the narrator wonders: "Is our planet ...
Wason, Robert Alexander
(1874-1955) US author, mostly of Westerns, who is of sf interest for "The Man Who Never Died" (September 1915-March 1916 Physical Culture), a magazine founded and still under the influence of Bernarr Macfadden. The story is told from the viewpoint of Amorio, a young woman in splendid health brought up in an isolated Keep by Andreas Vesalius (1514-"1564"), whose death by drowning was a ruse to ...
Egan, Beresford
(1905-1984) UK artist, illustrator and author, in South Africa from 1910 to 1926, who early established a reputation for sexually charged and otherwise transgressive illustrations for works like the 1928 translation of Pierre Louÿs's Aphrodite (1896); he also did covers for Aleister Crowley's Moonchild (1929) and Sean M'Guire's Lost Race novel Beast or Man? (1930): as in Crowley's ...
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 ...