SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Bullwinkle Show, The
US animated tv series (1959-1964) for the ABC network (1959-1961) and NBC network (1961-1964); during its first season it was titled Rocky and His Friends; it was later syndicated using other titles, including The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Jay Ward Productions. Produced by Bill Scott and Jay Ward. Created by Alex Anderson, Scott and Ward. Directors: Gerald Baldwin, Frank Braxton, Pete Burness, Sal Faillace, Paul Harvey, Jim Hiltz, William T Hurtz, Lew Keller, ...
Maison en Petits Cubes, La
Japanese short animated film (2008; vt The House of Small Cubes); original title Tsumiki no Ie. Robot Communications. Created and directed by Kunio Katō. Written by Kenya Hirata. 12 minutes. Colour. / An old man lives on the top floor of an otherwise submerged building; over the decades he has added several new floors as the waters continue to very slowly rise – though the floodwaters stretch to the horizon, an infrastructure exists ...
Giraud, Jean
(1938-2012) French artist, best known by his pseudonym Moebius, who also drew as Gir and for a period lived in the United States. Staggeringly prolific and remarkably inventive, Giraud was long considered one of Europe's major talents, and his loose, eloquent line style influenced an entire generation of fantasy and sf artists. Born near Paris, he displayed from childhood a love of illustration; his early influences were classic American Comic strips and the ...
Titanic
The loss on 15 April 1912 of RMS Titanic – at that time the largest passenger liner in existence – following its 14 April collision with an iceberg and the discovery of a serious lifeboat shortage, is an early and still very well remembered twentieth-century Icon of Disaster. Though direct relevance to sf is marginal, it is notable that four sf authors given entries in this book died in the shipwreck: John Jacob ...
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 ...