SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 26 May 2022
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 23 May 2022
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Hansen, L Taylor
(1897-1976) US anthropologist and author who attended the University of California Los Angeles for graduate work in science; she published numerous sf stories and popular science articles in the Pulp magazines between 1929 and 1949, beginning with "What the Sodium Lines Revealed" in Amazing Stories Quarterly for Winter 1929, and The Undersea Tube (November 1929 Amazing; 2008 ebook), detailing the failure of a subway under the Atlantic (see Transportation). Perhaps the most interesting of her ...
Kalstein, Dave
(? - ) US screenwriter and author whose Near Future sf novel, Prodigy (2005), is set in an elite highrise school on the edge of a thinly disguised Los Angeles (see California) in 2036; its students, subject to extremely intense Cultural Engineering, believe wrongly they are being shaped for a Utopian future. [JC]
Spanner, E F
(1888-1953) UK naval architect who, after his retirement from the Royal Corps of Naval Construction, was the author of three Future War novels: The Broken Trident (1926), which predicts the use of torpedoes launched by warplanes against vulnerable surface vessels; The Naviators (1926); and The Harbour of Death (1927), where future war battles take place in the Mediterranean. Spanner's recurring message is that the UK should not remain unduly dependent upon her navy. The dire consequences of so ...
Anime
Loanword in Japanese, derived from "animation", thought to be in occasional use since the rise of locally-made feature cartoons in the late 1950s, but popularized through its appropriation by Osamu Tezuka on the production of the Television series Tetsuwan Atomu ["Mighty Atom"] (1963; vt Astro Boy). Tezuka used the truncated term to refer to a truncated product, the "limited" animation, often at eight or less new images per second, as opposed to the "full" animation in cinemas that usually ...
Posey, Carl A
(1933- ) US author of two Technothrillers: Kiev Footprint (1983), set in the Near Future with the Cold War still raging, and a secret Weapon in a space shuttle about to crash into the planet; and Prospero Drill (1984), an sf adventure for Robert Hale Limited involving Weather Control. [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 ...