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Monday 10 November 2025
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 4 November 2025
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Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Alien Worlds
1. UK Digest-size magazine. One undated issue, circa July 1966, published and edited by Charles Partington and Harry Nadler. This featured some colour illustrations, a colour cover by Eddie Jones, stories by Kenneth Bulmer, J R (Ramsey) Campbell and Harry Harrison; articles on film were also included. ...
Field, Marlo
(? -? ) US author of whom nothing is known beyond his (her?) Hollow Earth tale, Astro Bubbles (1928), based on Cyrus Reed Teed's hypothesis that we live within a hollow cylinder, rather as though we inhabited a Generation Starship or World Ship. Field's world is, in fact, far more complex than that, though his/her compulsive didacticism ( ...
Symons, J H
(1873-1951) UK author, who also wrote as by Maurice Wolmar; some of his fiction is of sf interest. In The Supreme Mystery (1917), a Scientist sends the spirit of a medium into various past eras, upon which, as a kind of Time Viewer, she reports back. The protagonist later sends her into the future as well. The End of the Marriage Vow (1928) also features a Machine capable of ...
de Régnier, Henri
(1864-1936) French author, from the mid-1880s a member of the Symbolist Movement, whose members included Gustave Kahn as well as more famous figures like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), creating in Le Bosquet de Psyché ["Psyche's Arbor"] (1894) a significant presentation of the Symbolist ethos; in this context, he was a poet of importance. His prose works, which somewhat resemble those of his contemporary, Remy ...
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 ...