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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 ...
McGivern, William P
(1918-1982) US author, mostly of noir crime, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Visible Invisible Man" in Amazing Stories for December 1940, and remained very prolific, initially under two pseudonyms that later became House Names: P F Costello, this name being annexed by Ziff-Davis, and Gerald Vance, and wrote one story ...
Lazarus, Henry
(1855-1922) UK author, active in the 1890s, not to be confused with the well-known clarinetist, Henry Lazarus (1815-1895); his Future History, The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century: A Prospective History (1894), caused some stir through its advocacy of a welfare state, which the text pictures as following on from a revolution by the forces of Labour led by the redoubtable Carlyle Democritus. [JC]
Wilson, Kelpie
(1956- ) US engineer, environmental activist, journalist and author whose sf novel Primal Tears (2005) is an Apes as Human tale describing the birth and upbringing of a hybrid child, half Homo sapiens and half bonobo. A right-wing Christian fundamentalist sect threatens to destroy her (see Religion), but she escapes into the forests along the Pacific Rim, where she lives with protesters ...
Attack of the Crab Monsters
Film (1957). Los Altos/Allied Artists. Directed by Roger Corman. Written by Charles B Griffith. Cast includes Leslie Bradley, Pamela Duncan, Richard Garland and Russell Johnson. 70 minutes cut to 64 minutes. Black and white. / Two giant crabs, mutations (see Mutants) caused by radiation from an H-bomb test on an island, scuttle out of the sea and destroy all of one and most of another expedition to the island. Eerily, ...
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 ...