SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 September 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 7 September 2026
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Class of 1999
1. Film (1990). Lightning/Original/Vestron. Produced and directed by Mark L Lester. Written by C Courtney Joyner, based on a story by Lester. Cast includes Bradley Gregg, Pam Grier, Stacy Keach, Patrick Kilpatrick, Traci Lin, Malcolm McDowell and John P Ryan. 98 minutes. Colour. / In the USA of 1999 most Cities have no-go "Free Fire" zones ruled by teenage gangs, and many schools are closed. As an experiment, the Department of Educational Defense ...
3 Body Problem
US tv series (2024-current). BLB, The Three Body Universe, T-Street, Plan B Entertainment, Primitive Streak. Created and mostly written by David Benioff, D B Weiss and Alexander Woo, based on Santi by Liu Cixin Cixin (May-December 2006 Kehuan Shijie; 2007; trans Ken Liu as The Three-Body Problem 2014) and its sequels. Various directors. Cast includes Jovan Adepo, John ...
Hanna-Barbera
Animation studio founded by William Hanna (1910-2001) and Joseph Barbera (1911-2006) in 1957 (initially as H-B Enterprises), following the closure of the MGM cartoon studio for which they had created the classic Cat versus Mouse series Tom & Jerry (1940-current). The studio was bought by Taft Broadcasting in 1966, then by Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) in 1991, when Barbera and Hanna moved from being company heads to ...
Moffett, Judith
(1942- ) US academic, poet and author; a professor at the University of Pennsylvania 1979-1994. She was first active as a poet, publishing two collections – Keeping Time (coll 1976) and Whinny Moor Crossing (coll 1984); the full-length study, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (1984), contains an extensive study of Merrill's work of greatest sf interest, ...
Belot, Adolphe
(1829-1890) Guadeloupe-born French playwright and author of popular fiction, mostly melodramatic, and probably too "racy" to be publishable in English during his lifetime. He is known in translation only for the Miss Poles sequence comprising La Sultane parisienne (1877) and La Vénus Noire: Voyage Dans l'Afrique Central (1877; trans George D Cox as The Black Venus: A Tale of the Dark Continent 1881), both volumes having been translated ...
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 ...