SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Society
Film (1989). Wild Street Pictures. Directed by Brian Yuzna. Written by Woody Keith, Rick Fry. Cast includes Devin DeVasquez, Ben Meyerson and Bill Warlock. 99 minutes. Colour. / "Society" (as in the upper classes) is an Alien race, parasitic on humanity (as in the poor), that has been around as long as humans have, but we learn this only at the end. In the tradition of 1980s schlock/surrealist horror cinema (e.g., Re-Animator ...
Wrestling Women vs. the Killer Robot
Mexican film (1969; original title Las Luchadoras Vs El Robot Asesino). Cinematográfica Calderón S.A.. Directed by René Cardona. Written by Alfredo Salazar. Cast includes Carlos Agostí, Gloria Chávez, Joaquín Cordero, Héctor Lechuga, Genaro Moreno, Malú Reyes, Regina Torné and Gerardo Zepeda. 80 minutes. Colour. / A Robot in sunglasses abducts a tramp, taking ...
Schneider, Isidor
(1896-1977) US journalist, poet and author, who also served as Literary Editor of the left-wing journal New Masses in the 1930s and 1940s; of sf interest is Doctor Transit (1925) as by I S, an Identity Exchange tale in which a young married couple, unhappy with their native Genders, explore the coefficient of Sex in human relations by persuading the eponymous ...
Proehl, Bob
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the non-fantastic A Hundred Thousand Worlds (2016), weaves a complex family romance into an on-the-road hegira to a Comics Convention, whose rule-bound mores are both constrictive and liberating. He is of sf interest for his second novel, The Nobody People (2019), which depicts a father and his family coping first with the ...
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 ...