SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 March 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 9 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Yasuke
Japanese/US animated online tv series (2021). MAPPA. Created by LeSean Thomas. Directors include Takeru Satō. Written by Flying Lotus, Nick Jones Jr, Alex Larsen and LeSean Thomas. Voice cast includes Darren Criss, Dan Donohue, Amy Hill, Takehiro Hira, Kenji Kitamura, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Julie Marcus, Hiroki Nanami, Yoshiko Sakakibara, Jun Soejima, Lakeith Stanfield, William Christopher Stephens, Kiko Tamura; Rie Tanaka; Maya Tanida, Shigeru Ushiyama and ...
Sector General [series]
James White's long-running Series of Sector General stories, centred on the vast, multispecies Space Habitat whose full name is Sector Twelve General Hospital, are popular and likeable examples of Medicine-based sf. The sequence began with Hospital Station (stories November 1957-June 1960 New Worlds; coll of linked stories ...
Kiddy Grade
Japanese animated tv series (2002-2003). Gonzo. Directed by Keiji Gotoh. Written by Hidefumi Kimura. Character designs by Megumi Kadonosono. Voice cast includes Aya Hirano and Ryoko Nagata. 24 25-minute episodes. Colour. / Set in a distant future where humanity is unified under a Galactic Union, this Space Opera follows two operatives (de facto Superheroes) of the Galactic Organization of ...
Horace, Lillian Jones
(1880-1965) US teacher and author whose Five Generations Hence (1916) as Mrs Lillian B Jones is the first Utopia published by a Black woman in America. Its protagonist, devastated by an initial true vision of the conditions of life for Blacks in contemporary America, has a second vision of life five generations hence in Africa, of a country where all are equal. She then dedicates herself to bringing this vision about. [JC]
Cowan, James
(1841-1906) US author and journalist whose sf novel, Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World (1896), features an ambulatory Moon which after falling into the Pacific Ocean makes it possible for the narrator of the tale, with companions, to fly to Mars in a Balloon, where they discover a new defence of Christianity in the form of parallel Evolution and multiple incarnations of ...
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 ...