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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 ...
Richards, Guy
(1905-1979) US author and reporter. In Two Roubles to Times Square (1956; vt Brother Bear 1956) a Near Future Russian takeover of Manhattan (see New York) by a humane dissident Invasion force is embarrassedly disowned by the Kremlin. [JC]
Westlake, Michael
(1942- ) UK author and editor, much of whose work has been in film studies. One Zero and the Night Controller (1980) is a Fabulation in which a taxi driver tracks down an occult nocturnal mystery; Imaginary Women (1987) plays with questions of Perception as conveyed through the hallucinations of film; and in 51 Soko: To the Islands on the Other Side of the World (1990) ...
Hydrozagadka
["Hydro-Mystery"] Film (1971). Zespół Filmowy Plan. Directed by Andrzej Kondratiuk. Written by Andrzej Bonarski and Andrzej Kondratiuk. Cast includes Iga Cembrzyńska, Roman Kłosowski, Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, Wiesław Michnikowski and Józef Nowak. 70 minutes. Black and white. / Hydro-Mystery uses the Superhero genre as a vehicle for Satire. Shot in 1970 and released in 1971, the ...
Stroud, Allen
(? - ) UK academic, Videogame writer and author, involved in the creation and marketing of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game Elite Dangerous launched 2014 on the back of previous failed or baulked versions under various names; he wrote one Tie to the game, Elite: Lave Revolution (2014). The Wisimir Tales sequence ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...