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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 ...
Gillet, A F
(1861-? ) US inventor, who held some patents for agricultural tools, and author of an sf novel for boys, Titan and Volcan [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1933), whose two protagonists discover a floating Island named Volcan which is inhabited by a miniature Lost Race (see Great and Small); they boast advanced Technology and a humane ...
Strange Days
Film (1995). Universal Pictures presents a Lightstorm Entertainment production. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. Cast includes Angela Bassett, Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore and Michael Wincott. 145 minutes. Colour. / In the last days of 1999, after Los Angeles (see California) has become a no man's land, a trafficker in bootleg recordings of first-person experiences is ...
Nolane, Richard D
Pseudonym of French author, editor and Comics writer Olivier Raynaud (1955- ), who began to publish work of genre interest in 1977 and whose first English-language publication was as the editor for DAW Books of Terra SF: The Year's Best European SF (anth 1981), a useful anthology of Western European sf in translation. This was followed by Terra SF II: The Year's Best European SF (anth ...
Dey, Frederick Van Rensselaer
(1861-1922) US lawyer and author who began to write fiction as early as 1881 under various names, and as Chickering Carter – see under that name for further details – was a central contributor to, and almost certainly the best author to be involved in, the Nick Carter series (see Nick Carter), writing at least 400 stories of varying length for the sequence. He also wrote stories, of various kinds, as by ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...