SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 April 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 6 April 2026
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Falls, The
Film (1980). British Film Institute. Directed by Peter Greenaway. Written by Greenaway. 187 minutes. Colour. / Perhaps the most elliptical Disaster in sf Cinema, the Violent Unknown Event (VUE) has killed an unspecified number of people and afflicted 19 million others with bizarre symptoms including physical mutation (see Mutants), recurring dreams of water, sexual quadromorphism, the spontaneous ...
Prix du Danger, Le
French/Yugoslav Film (1983; vt The Prize of Peril). Swanie/TFI/UGC-Top 1/Avala. Directed by Yves Boisset. Written by Boisset, Jan Curtelin, based on "The Prize of Peril" (May 1958 F&SF) by Robert Sheckley. Cast includes Gérard Lanvin, Michel Piccoli and Marie-France Pisier. 98 minutes, cut to 88 minutes in English-dubbed version. Colour. / In this ...
Desamours, Channelle
(? - ) US teacher and author; the protagonist of her first novel, the Young Adult Needy Little Things (2025), is a Black teenager immersed in the complexities of life in Atlanta, where she discovers herself to possess a Psi Power combining Telepathy (she can hear others' unspoken needs) and Precognition (what they ...
McCaffrey, Anne
(1926-2011) US-born professional horsebreeder and author, in Ireland from the 1970s; mother of Gigi McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey. Most of her output was sf, though tinged with the tone and instruments of Fantasy: much of her main work, the enormous Pern sequence of Planetary Romance adventures (see below) is normally experienced as fantasy. She began ...
Sheldon, Roy
UK House Name used by Hamilton & Co. (which published Panther Books) on short fiction and full-length novels in Authentic Science Fiction 1951-1952 and on a number of routine sf novels 1952-1954 by H J Campbell and E C Tubb. George Hay – included in the above list in the second edition of this encyclopedia – ...
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 ...