SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 6 June 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 6 June 2023
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Ad Astra [film]
Film (2019). New Regency Pictures, Bona Film Group, Keep Your Head. Directed by James Gray. Written by Gray and Ethen Gross. Cast includes Loren Dean, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Brad Pitt, Donald Sutherland, Liv Tyler. 123 minutes. Colour. / Several decades into an undated Near Future, the US Space Command sends po-faced Major Roy McBride (Pitt) to Mars on an urgent mission to attempt to communicate at long-distance with his ...
Hirose Tadashi
Pseudonym for jazz saxophonist and author Shōkichi Hirose (1924-1972), who came within a hair's breadth of winning mainstream literary awards in Japan on several occasions during his brief career as a crime and sf author. A former engineering student at Nihon University, he formed the band "Tadashi Hirose and the Sky Tones" in 1952, and only turned to writing after the debt-ridden group disbanded in 1960. His first published story was the non-sf "Koroshisō ...
Welch, Edgar L
Initials used as a pseudonym by Elizabeth Waterhouse. /
Palm Springs
Film (2020). Limelight Productions in association with The Lonely Island, Sun Entertainment. Directed by Max Barbakow. Written by Andy Siara. Cast includes Cristin Milioti, Andy Samberg and J K Simmons. 90 minutes. Colour. / In Palm Springs, California, Sarah (Milioti) attends her sister's wedding. Her flirtation with a sardonic, Hawaiian-shirted guest named Nyles (Samberg) is disrupted when a masked assailant (Simmons) shoots Nyles with a bow. In the ...
Westwood, Alvin
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of Sinister Forces (1953), a Space Opera in which the exploration of a wandering planet with dead inhabitants leads to a threat of interstellar War. [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 ...