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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 ...
Eschbach, Andreas
(1959- ) German author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Dolls" for c't in 1991, and whose first novel, Die Haarteppichknüpfer (1995; trans Doryl Jensen as The Carpet Makers 2005), intriguingly rewrites the normally expansive forms of American Planetary Romance and Space Opera into a bleak, compulsively storyable ...
Chapman, Edgar L
(1936-2019) US academic and sf critic, with the English Department at Bradley University (Peoria, Illinois) 1963-2002, then professor emeritus at Bradley until his death. His solo works include studies of Philip José Farmer and Robert Silverberg: The Magic Labyrinth of Philip José Farmer (1984 chap) and The Road to Castle Mount: The Science Fiction of Robert Silverberg (1999). ...
Fawkes, Frank Attfield
(1849-1941) UK industrialist and author, mostly of nonfiction, whose one sf novel, Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe: Being a Record of Some Strange Adventures in the Remarkable Career of a Political and Social Reformer Who Was Famous at the Commencement of the Twentieth Century (1895) as by X, is a Future War tale dominated by intrigues surrounding the complex triumph of a British reformer known as Marmaduke who proposes a European state, and after his ...
Toxic Avenger, The
Film (1984). HCH/Troma/Palan. Directed by Michael Herz, Samuel Weil. Written by Joe Ritter, based on a story by Lloyd Kaufman. Cast includes Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda and Mark Torgl. 100 minutes, cut to 79 minutes. Colour. / After a cruel practical joke is played on him, a teenage nerd falls into a barrel of toxic waste in Tromaville, New Jersey, "Toxic Waste Capital of America". He mutates (see Mutants) into the low-budget ...
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 ...