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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 ...
Galton, Francis
(1822-1911) UK geneticist, eugenicist and author, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and a speculative thinker from his early years: The Telotype; a Printing Electric Telegraph (1849 chap [dated 1850]) describes the use of typewriters (not yet invented) to convey messages electrically over long distances. He is of course most important in sf terms for coining the word Eugenics, which he defined as "the science of improving ...
Contract
Russian animated film (1985; original title Kontrakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Viktor Slavkin, based on Robert Silverberg's "Company Store" (in Star Science Fiction Stories 5, anth 1959, ed Frederik Pohl). Voice cast includes Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy and Evgeniy Steblov. 10 minutes. Colour. / ...
Crisp, Frank R
(1915-1996) UK author, at one time in the Merchant Navy; his Dirk Rogers sea adventures, which are his best work, sometimes veer close to the fantastic. His sf novels, The Ape of London (1959) and The Night Callers (1960), are routine adventures deploying thriller and horror elements; their sf displacement is inconsiderable. The latter, involving an alien Invasion, was filmed as The ...
War-Gods of the Deep
Film (1965; vt City in the Sea). Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors (UK), American International Pictures (US). Produced by Daniel Haller and George Willoughby. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Written by Charles Bennett and Louis M Heyward with additional dialogue by David Whitaker. Based very loosely on Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The City in the Sea" (in Poems, coll 1831 chap, as ...
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 ...