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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Cat-Man
US Comic (1941-1946). Temerson, Helnit, Continental (#1-#5; #18-#32) and Holyoke (#6-#17). 33 issues; numbering is confusing, but #32 is the 33rd issue, there being two separate issues considered to be #26. Artists include Jack Alderman, L B Cole, Alan Mandel, Rudy Palais, Charles Quinlan Sr, C R Schaare and Allen Ulmer, with at least one cover by Alex Schomburg. Script writers include Herman C Browner, Charles Quinlan Jr, Don Rico ...
Stalking the Night Fantastic
Role Playing Game (1983). Tri Tac Games. Designed by Richard Tucholka, Chris Belting. / While it is often reminiscent of the similarly titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975), Stalking the Night Fantastic takes a far more light-hearted approach to its investigations of the alien and the extraordinary. Players adopt the roles of agents of "Bureau 13", a secret branch of the ...
Hale, Benjamin
(1983- ) US author whose first novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (2011), casually addresses issues of Evolution, though the first person narrator of the tale, an implausibly evolved chimpanzee (see Apes as Human), after describing his early years in a Zoo focuses primarily on the nature of language (see Linguistics) and ...
Ghost in the Shell
1. Animated film (1995). Kodansha/Bandai Visual Manga Entertainment. Directed by Mamoru Oshii. Written by Kazunori Ito, based on the Manga Ghost in the Shell (1989-1991) by Masamune Shirow. 82 minutes. Colour. / Released with a relatively high profile in the West, Ghost in the Shell became one of the most influential Anime ...
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 ...