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Wednesday 15 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 ...
Cat from Outer Space, The
US film (1978). Walt Disney Productions (see The Walt Disney Company), Buena Vista Distribution. Directed by Norman Tokar. Written by Ted Key. Cast includes Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan, Roddy McDowall, Harry Morgan, William Prince and Ronnie Schell. 104 minutes. Colour. / Minor, light-hearted comedy in which a Cat (voiced by Schell) who is a spacefaring Alien ...
Howell, George Rogers
(1833-1899) US educationist, editor and author of Noah's Log Book: How Two Americans Blasted the Ice on Mt Ararat and Found Noah's Ark and Some Curious Relics (coll 1898), the title tale describing the discovery of, and transcribing, Noah's journal. To this is appended "The Open Polar Sea: Its Discovery by an Unknown New Yorker, Believed to be From the East End of Long Island", whose narrator has travelled by Balloon to a clement ...
Haldeman, Jack C, II
(1941-2002) US biologist and author, married to Vol Haldeman and later (in 1995) to Barbara Delaplace, who began publishing sf with "Garden of Eden" in Fantastic for December 1971. His fifty or so stories tend to avoid the more serious Space-Opera themes, sticking generally to Games-and-Sports tales about Robot football players, ...
Hodge, T Shirby
Pseudonym of US author Roger Sherman Tracy (1841-1926). His sf novel, The White Man's Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), is set in 5000 CE, by which period the warlike and primitive white races (see Race in SF) have been restricted to North America while, in Black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific genius have generated a Utopian world. A white Invasion suffers ignominious defeat, and ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...