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Saturday 8 November 2025
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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Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Howard, Keble
Pseudonym of UK author John Keble Bell (1875-1928), whose novel of genre interest, The Peculiar Major: An Almost Incredible Story (1919), hovers Equipoisally between fantasy and sf, as its subtitle hints. The Invisibility which allows a British army officer to perform heroic exploits in World War One – while clearly influenced by H G Wells's ...
Alraune
Film (1928; vt Unholy Love; vt Daughter of Destiny). Ama Film. Directed by Henrik Galeen. Written by Galeen, based on Alraune (1911; trans 1929) by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Cast includes Brigitte Helm, Ivan Petrovich and Paul Wegener. 125 minutes. Black and white. / A professor of genetics (Wegener) conducts a cold-blooded experiment into the Nature-versus-nurture controversy. Using the semen of a hanged man to ...
Marriott, H P Fitzgerald
(1865-1939) UK anthropologist and author of The Iron Detective of Germany: A Comedy of the Near Future (1908), set in the Near Future and describing the Invention of a Robot detective capable of Telepathy. [JC]
Timlin, William M
(1892-1943) UK-born architect, illustrator and author, in South Africa from 1912. The Ship that Sailed to Mars: A Fantasy (graph 1923), his only fiction, is more fantasy than sf, though it does describe in glowing detail the fitting up of a Spaceship and its trip to Mars, where extravagant Monsters are encountered. But Timlin's astonishingly evocative illustrations to the text – for which ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...