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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 14 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 ...
Colomb, Philip Howard
(1831-1899) UK naval officer and author of several works on naval strategy; he was the main author [with a number of colleagues, see Checklist] of The Great War of 189–: A Forecast (2 January-21 May 1891 Black and White as "The Great War of 1892"; dated 1893 but 1892), a highly detailed Future War description of a very wide-flung "Great War" which begins in the Balkans with an attempted assassination, leading to a conflict where Germany ...
Brownjohn, Alan
(1931-2024) UK poet, politician, teacher, man-of-letters and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Contest in Crime" in Young Winter's Tales 2 (anth 1971) edited by M R Hodgkin; he also wrote as by John Berrington. His poetry – and relatively infrequent fiction – was irradiated by a wry, compassionate, occasionally bitter socialist perspective on the course of British history; in this he was like and unlike Philip Larkin (1922-1985), as ...
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The
Film (2003). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Stephen Norrington. Written by James Dale Robinson, based on the America's Best Comics Graphic Novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 (1999-2000; graph 2000) by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Cast includes Sean Connery, Tony Curran, Jason Flemyng, Richard Roxburgh, Naseeruddin Shah, Stuart Townsend, Shane West and Peta Wilson. 110 ...
Ward, Henry
(1921-1989) Pseudonym of French author Henri-Louis-Luc Viard (1921-1989), who also wrote as by Louis-François Beaumetz and Louis-François Carlemont. His sf novels, as by Ward, are Les soleils verts (1956; trans Neame as The Green Suns 1961) and L'enfer est dans le ciel (1958; trans Alan Neame as Hell's Above Us 1960). The first book contains a detailed biography of Henry Ward in the introduction, claiming that he was a ...
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 ...