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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.
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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 ...
Collins, Bridget
(1981- ) UK actor and author active in the latter capacity, usually as by B R Collins, from the publication of The Traitor Game (2008), the first of several Young Adult novels, some containing fantasy elements. She is of wider interest for her two adult novels. The Binding (2019) is a fantasy about the ability of Story to tell the life of its teller. The Betrayals (2020) is no more fantasy than ...
O'Loughlin, Ed
(1966- ) Canadian journalist and author, some of whose earlier novels verge into Technothriller country but are not fantastic. His fourth novel, the very Near Future This Eden (2021), is of sf interest for its depiction of a world where games (see Games and Sports) do not only reflect reality but increasingly create the world. Though told with some ...
Tom Corbett: Space Cadet
US tv series (1950-1955). CBS TV, later ABC TV, and then NBC TV for season five. Produced by Mort Abrahams. Writers included Albert Aley, Alfred Bester, Joseph Greene, Jack Weinstock. Directors included George Gould, Ralph Ward. Cast includes Michael Harvey, Al Markim, Jan Merlin and Frankie Thomas. Five seasons. Three fifteen-minute episodes weekly for the first four seasons; weekly ...
My 20th Century
Hungarian film (1989; original title Az én XX. századom). Produced by Archy Dolder, Norbert Freidländer, Gábor Sarudi and Andrzej Schwartz. Written and directed by Ildikó Enyedi. Cast includes Péter Andorai, Paulus Manker, Dorota Segda and Oleg Yankovskiy. 102 minutes. Black and white. / Dora and Lilli are twin sisters (both played by Segda) who are born in Budapest in 1880 at the same moment that Thomas ...
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 ...