SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 February 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
LOLA
UK/Irish film (2022). Cowtown Pictures, Headgear Films, Kreo Films FZ. Directed by Andrew Legge. Written by Legge and Angeli MacFarlane; story by Henrietta Ashworth, Jessica Ashworth and Legge. Cast includes Emma Appleton, Rory Fleck Byrne, Aaron Monaghan and Stefanie Martini. 79 minutes. Black and white. / An opening caption tells us that in 2021 some reels of film were discovered in a country house in Sussex. What we see is that film. Two sisters, Thom (Appleton) and Mars (Martini) ...
Hopkins, Pauline
(1859-1940) US editor, journalist, playwright, actor and author active from around 1880, whose difficult literary career (she was African-American) ended after the publication of her fourth novel, Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (November 1902-January 1903 The Colored American Magazine; 2004). The protagonist of the tale – a medical student in Boston named Reuel Briggs, passing for white at a time of ferocious prejudice in America – becomes enamoured of a ...
Big Meat Eater
Film (1982). BCD Entertainment. Director Chris Windsor. Written by Windsor, Laurence Keane. Cast includes George Dawson, Andrew Gillies, Big Miller and Howard Taylor. 82 minutes. Colour. / This Canadian musical pastiche of sf and horror films – a sort of designer midnight movie about an Invasion by two Aliens of a small town in the 1950s – waves its low budget like a flag and, despite incoherences, is cheerfully ...
Arscott, David
(1942-2024) UK author, chiefly of nonfiction histories of Sussex [not listed below], and radio broadcaster who collaborated with David J Marl (? - ) on the Eye and the Blade sequence, three linked fantasy novels set in a nonmagical Alternate World which has a nineteenth-century flavour. In The Frozen City (1984) some symbolism is deployed, the nameless City being not ...
Smit, Sam
(? - ) UK author whose The Serendipity Foundation (2016) focuses on the twenty-first century plan of an aeons-old cabal of Secret Masters to blackmail the world into behaving sanely. The tone is forcedly comic, but intermittently relaxes into seriousness. [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 ...