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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 ...
Surrogates
Film (2009). Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company) presents a Mandeville Films production. Directed by Jonathan Mostow. Written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris from the Comics series The Surrogates (5 issues 2005-2006; graph 2009) by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele. Cast includes James Cromwell, Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis. 89 minutes. Colour. / Surrogates are ...
Payne, Bernal C, Jr
(1941- ) US author the protagonists of whose Time Travel novel for Young Adult readers, It's About Time (1984; vt Trapped in Time 1986), travels back to 1955 where they meet their parents as teenagers. The future children of their marriage must ensure it takes place. The slightly later Back to the Future, released 1985, was conceived ...
Wieler, Diana J
(1961- ) Canadian author whose Young Adult RanVan sequence beginning with RanVan the Defender (1993) whose protagonist, through his obsession with Videogames, develops the ability to uncover evil through a camera that, using a Superpower that has been bestowed upon him, is able to penetrate untruths and to right wrongs. The action is constant, and ...
Talabi, Wole
(1986- ) Nigerian engineer, editor and author now resident in Malaysia. Talabi began publishing work of genre interest with "The Human Thing" in The Naked Convos in 2011. He made his first professional sale with "Wednesday's Story" in Lightspeed Magazine for May 2016, and has since published a string of works in genre publications including F&SF, Clarkesworld and others. "The Regression Test" ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...