SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 21 September 2024
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.
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Burroughs, William S
(1914-1997) US author born into a successful business family, and a Harvard graduate in English literature in 1936, but a deeply transgressive and famous drop-out thereafter. He lived in Mexico, North Africa and the UK, and for many years was a heroin addict. He began writing in the late 1930s, but had no success until the early 1950s when he wrote two confessional books: Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953 as by William Lee; rev as by Burroughs 1977) and ...
Derleth, August
(1909-1971) US author and editor, born in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he spent his life. A correspondent with and devout admirer of H P Lovecraft, he devoted much of his life to projects aimed at preserving Lovecraft's memory. The most important of these projects was of course the founding, with Donald Wandrei, of the publishing company Arkham House in Sauk City in order to publish ...
Sturgeon's Law
An aphorism formulated by Theodore Sturgeon in the early 1950s: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." This needs to be placed in context as his response to blanket condemnations of sf which were based on the worst examples of the genre. According to James Gunn, Sturgeon's Law originated in a Sturgeon talk at the 1953 Worldcon, and was phrased approximately as ...
White, Richard Grant
(1822-1885) US editor, journalist and author whose The Fall of Man; Or, the Loves of the Gorillas [for full title see Checklist below] (1871 chap) as by A Learned Gorilla is a Satire on the Darwinian theory of Evolution as developed earlier the same year in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); Grant's comic Satire consists of a lecture given in Africa by a ...
Planetes
Japanese animated tv series (2003-2004). Sunrise. Directed by Gorō Taniguchi. Written by Ichirō Ōkouchi and Makoto Yukimura, based on the Manga by Makoto Yukimura. Voice cast includes Ai Orikasa, Kazunari Tanaka, Unshô Ishizuka and Satsuki Yukino. 26 25-minute episodes. Colour. / In 2075 first-world corporations dominate space and the exploitation of its resources. As their ...
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 ...