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Friday 17 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 ...
Cox, Alex
(1954- ) UK filmmaker still best known for his first feature Repo Man (1984), for which he wrote the novelization Repo Man: Not Just a Job – It's an Adventure (1988); this segues from a hyperbolic mean-street tale whose young protagonist is recruited as a repo man, and begins almost unwittingly to uncover a conspiratorial underlife in America whose currents pull him in the direction of UFO ...
City Limits
Film (1984). Sho Films/Videoform/Island Alive. Directed by Aaron Lipstadt. Written by Don Opper, from a story by Lipstadt and James Reigle. Cast includes Kim Cattrall, Rae Dawn Chong, Darrell Larson and John Stockwell. 85 minutes. Colour. / Disappointing exploitation movie from the writer and director of the first-rate Android (1982). Fifteen years after the USA has been almost wiped out by a Pandemic, two biker ...
Barren, Charles
(1913-1999) UK teacher and author, best known for historical romances; co-author with R Cox Abel of Trivana I (1966), in which an overpopulated Earth uses the titular Spaceship (powered by an Ion Drive) to establish a Venus colony (see Colonization of Other Worlds). Barren also scripted a sf drama, "The Planet of ...
Behind the Planet of the Apes
Television documentary (1998) about the making of the sf film Planet of the Apes (1968) and its sequels. Van Ness Films. Directed by Kevin Burns and David Comtois; written by Burns, Comtois and Brian Anthony. Featuring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, and production team members including Mort Abrahams. 127 minutes. Colour. [DRL] links / ...
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 ...