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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 ...
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Film (1984). Umbrella-Rosenblum/Virgin Cinema Films. Directed by Michael Radford. Written by Radford, Jonathan Gems, based on Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell. Cast includes Richard Burton, Cyril Cusack, Suzanna Hamilton and John Hurt. 110 minutes. Colour. / This second film version (see 1984 for the first) is better acted and more intelligent than its ...
Wilson, JJ Amaworo
(1969- ) German-born Nigerian/UK playwright and author, most recently in USA, active since the early 1990s, his early plays and stories being nonfantastic; he has published his academic nonfiction, mostly textbooks on language learning, as JJ Wilson; son of fantasy author David Henry Wilson. He is of initial sf interest for Damnificados (2016), set in a Near Future urban conglomeration ...
Fnord
A much-quoted item of sf Terminology, originally introduced in the anarcho-religious tract Principia Discordia (1965) by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, and widely popularized in the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In the Paranoia-riddled context of an assumed global conspiracy, fnords are defined as ...
Dark
German tv series (2017-2020). Netflix/W&B Television. Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Directed by Baran bo Odar. Written by Odar and Friese. Other writers are Martin Behnke, Daphne Ferraro, Ronny Schalk and Marc O Seng. Cast includes Karoline Eichhorn, Dietrich Hollinderbäumer, Louis Hoffmann, Oliver Masucci, Andreas Pietschmann, Maja Schöne, Christian Steyer, Jördis Triebel and Lisa Vicari. 26 episodes of 44 to 73 minutes. ...
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 ...