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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 ...
Fantastic Voyages
The fantastic voyage is one of the oldest literary forms, the first paradigm instances of its use being the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BCE, and Homer's Odyssey (circa sixth century BCE); it remains one of the basic frameworks for the casting of literary fantasies. Of the prose forms extant before the development of the form of nonfantastic prose fiction that became identified as the novel in the eighteenth century, the ...
Vasari, Ruggero
(1898-1968) Italian painter, editor and author associated with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the evolution of Futurism before around 1930, but strongly opposed to Marinetti's "robust" exaltation of the Machine as the shaping engine of a clean future. Vasari dramatized his opposition in L'angoscia delle macchine ["The Anguish of the Machines"] (written 1923; 1925 chap), a play set in a surreal ...
Ellanby, Boyd
Joint pseudonym of Lyle Gifford Boyd (1907-1982) and her husband William Clouser Boyd (1903-1983), the latter a professor of immunochemistry at Boston University, Massachusetts. They began to publish work of genre interest with Category Phoenix (May 1952 Galaxy; 2010 ebook), continuing to a total of fourteen stories in various contemporary SF Magazines until 1958, as well as a small number of essays for such magazines ...
Riley, Philip J
(1948- ) US author and editor best known for publishing a number of classic Universal Pictures film scripts with commentary and additional material including photographs, beginning with Frankenstein (1989) (see Frankenstein), The Bride of Frankenstein (1989) (see The Bride of Frankenstein) and The Mummy (1989), opening 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 ...