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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.
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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 ...
Nazarian, Vera
(1966- ) Russian-born US author of Armenian-Russian extraction who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Wound in the Moon" in Sword and Sorceress II: An Anthology of Heroic Fantasy (anth 1985) edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Most of her work is Fantasy, historical or otherwise [see Checklist below]. She is of direct sf interest for the ...
Star Cops
UK tv series (1987). BBC TV. Devised by Chris Boucher, produced by Evgeny Gridneff, script edited by Joanna Willett. Directors Christopher Baker, Graeme Harper. Writers Boucher (5 episodes), Philip Martin and John Collee. Cast includes Jonathan Adams, David Calder, Trevor Cooper, Erick Ray Evans, Linda Newton and Anna Shoun. Nine 55-minute episodes. Colour. / It is 2027 CE. Nathan Spring (Calder) is the new head detective of the International Space ...
Event Horizon
Film (1997). Paramount Pictures. Directed by Paul W S Anderson. Written by Philip Eisner. Cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, Richard T Jones, Sam Neill, Jack Noseworthy, Sean Pertwee, Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson. 96 minutes. Colour. / In the mid-twenty-first century, an experimental spaceship, the Event Horizon, vanishes without trace in the outer solar system. Seven years later the ship is detected when it sends an ...
Kranz, E Kirker
(1949- ) US teacher and author of The Clouded Mirror (1971), a Time Travel tale featuring a Time Machine that remains physically immobile, though the worlds revealed, as the traveller passes hither and yon, vary widely. [JC]
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 ...