SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Up
Animated film (2009). Pixar/Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Pete Docter. Written by Bob Peterson and Docter, based on a story by Docter, Peterson and Thomas McCarthy. Cast includes Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai and Christopher Plummer. 93 minutes. Colour. / A Lost World adventure with Steampunk flourishes, Up is most notable for containing two of the most effective tear-jerking scenes in cinema history. The first ...
Cheney, Frank J
(1851-1919) US businessman and author whose first book, A Life of Unity and Other Stories (coll 1901), contains some fantasies. He is of sf interest for Ten Thousand Years Hence or 19002 of the Christian Era (1909), whose contemporary protagonist, the richest man in the world, finds himself transported (perhaps by Time Machine) to an Island ten millennia hence. Its inhabitants of the ...
Dream Hacking
Term used in this encyclopedia for the now frequent sf trope in which entry is made into someone's personal dreams or mental landscape (as though this literal Inner Space were a physical geography or Pocket Universe) to study or influence the contents. This has long been imagined as an intriguing technique of future Psychology. / A pioneering sf example is Peter ...
Wild Robot, The
US animated film (2024). DreamWorks Animation. Based on The Wild Robot (2016) by Peter Brown. Directed and written by Chris Sanders. Voice cast includes Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Lupita Nyong'o, Catherine O'Hara and Pedro Pascal. 102 minutes. Colour. / Following a typhoon, several damaged boxes containing Robots are washed up on the shores of a forested island; curious otters accidentally press the On switch ...
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 ...