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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 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 ...
Missile to the Moon
Film (1958). Astor. Directed by Richard E Cunha. Written by H E Barrie and Vincent Fotre. Cast includes Nina Bara, Gary Clarke, Tommy Cook, Cathy Downs, K T Stevens, Richard Travis and Michael Whalen. 78 minutes. Black and white. / In this loose remake of Cat-Women of the Moon (1953; vt Rocket to the Moon), members of the dying lunar race send one of their few remaining males, Scientist Dirk Green ...
Dieudonné, Florence Carpenter
(1850-1927) US author. In her Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star (1887) the tale's several protagonists travel through the solar system in a mountain which, propelled by explosions, serves as a Spaceship that takes them to a large inhabited Asteroid, where the central figure of the tale becomes king of the native bird-people, who are in fact of vegetable origin, and who are replaced by ferocious elves when the ...
Cooper, Merian C
(1893-1973) US screenwriter, film director and producer best known for directing and producing (with Ernest B Schoedsack) the original King Kong (1933), based on a story by himself and Edgar Wallace. Both Cooper and Wallace are given title credit in the resulting novel Tie: King Kong: Conceived by Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper: Novelization by Delos W Lovelace (1932) by Delos W ...
Hogan, Ernest
(1955- ) US author, married to Lee Hogan, who began publishing sf with "The Rape of Things to Come" in Amazing for March 1982. His first novel, Cortez on Jupiter (1990), uses the subversive tone of Cyberpunk to tell the tale of a countercultural street artist looking for fulfilment, travelling from the usual hyperbolic Near-Future ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...