SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 11 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.
Site updated on 10 November 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Orb Speculative Fiction
Australian low-paying Semiprozine published by Orb Publications, South Preston, Victoria and edited by Sarah Endacott; eight issues to date, Spring/Summer 1999 to #8, 2010; began with issue #0 but had a combined issue #3/#4, 2002. Issue #8 is a huge (420 page) "best of" retrospective of the previous seven issues. Orb is amongst the elite of Australian magazines, originally published annually, but with only two issues since ...
Pruyn, Leonard
(1898-1973) US author, in active service during World War One, whose two short sf stories appeared a year apart: "In Time of Sorrow" in Authentic Science Fiction for February 1954 and "A La Carte" in Spaceway for February 1955. His brief sf career continued and concluded with an sf novel, World without Women (1960) with Day Keene, about the ...
Prehistoric SF
The late nineteenth-century growth of interest in primal humanity and its forebears (see Anthropology; Apes as Human; Evolution; Origin of Man) led to a broad category of imaginative fiction that might be termed Prehistoric Romance – colourful tales of primitives, freed even from the contemporary Lost-Race story's modest ...
Dragon Ball
Japanese animated tv series (1986-1989). Based on the Manga by Akira Toriyama (1955-2024). Toei Animation. Directed by Daisuke Nishio and Minoru Okazaki. Written by Toshiki Inoue and Takao Koyama. Voice cast includes Takeshi Aono, Shigeru Chiba, Toshio Furukawa, Shōzō Iizuka, Masako Nozawa, Osamu Saka, Mayumi Sho, Naoki Tatsuta and Hiromi Tsuru. 153 24-minute episodes. Colour. / One day Old ...
Balmanno, Robert
(1951- ) US librarian and author of the Blessings of Gaia series beginning with September Snow (2006), set initially in a Near Future California ravaged by Climate Change, and under the sway of a Religion that extols Gaia but which has been corrupted. This faith now shapes a totalitarian ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...