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Wednesday 22 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.
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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 ...
End of the World
Together with Utopias and cautionary tales, apocalyptic visions form one of the three principal traditions of pre-twentieth-century futuristic fantasy. Visions inspired by the religious imagination go back into antiquity (see Mythology; Religion), and the artist John Martin depicted vast biblical catastrophes with particular relish from the 1820s to the 1850s; but the ...
Shadow of Memories
Videogame (2001; vt Shadow of Destiny). Konami. Designed by Junko Kawano. Platforms: PS2 (2001); Win, XBox (2002); PSP (2009). / Shadow of Memories is a highly atmospheric graphical Adventure with an unusual plot; the player must solve the mystery of their own murder. The display is fully three-dimensional, and the gameplay revolves around puzzle solution and conversation with computer ...
Speedball
Videogame series (from 1988). The Bitmap Brothers (TBB). / The Speedball series is a line of violent sports games (see Videogames), frequently evocative of the film Rollerball (1975). While there have been a number of well received sports Videogames with a fantasy theme, mostly derived from the American football inspired ...
White, Mark J
(? - ) UK author of the Near Future sf novel An Idol Killing (1997), set in a Dystopian Britain suffering Ecological collapse; a rock star eco-terrorist is threatened with assassination during the performance of his last gig. The world turns grimmer than before. [JC]
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 ...