SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Dead Leaves
Japanese animated film (2004). Production I.G. Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi. Written by Takeichi Honda. Cast includes Takako Honda, Yuko Mizutani and Kappei Yamaguchi. Music by Yoshihiro Ike. 50 minutes. Colour. / A young couple wake naked and Amnesiac on wasteland at the edge of a City; they respond with a violent crime spree resulting in their capture and imprisonment in a penal colony (see ...
Ingpen, Robert
(1936- ) Australian artist, illustrator and author, active from the late 1950s; most of his work is nonfiction or fantasy, the latter usually for children; he has also illustrated a very wide range of titles. He is of sf interest for the Australian Gnomes sequence beginning with Australian Gnomes (1979), which won a 1980 Ditmar Award for best novel, though its narrative elements are ...
May, Karl
(1842-1912) German author, much of whose output consisted of Westerns conceived under the clear influence of James Fenimore Cooper; the most famous of these is the Winnetou sequence, featuring the eponymous Native American (as noble as many Germans) and the white man, Old Shatterhand (a projection of the author), the central story being told in Winnetou, der rote Gentleman ...
Loontown
US live-action and animated film (2023). Positronish Productions. Directed by Nir Yaniv. Written by Lavie Tidhar. Cast includes Kenneth Jay, Al Lubel, Digger Mesch, Nathan Osgood, Katie Snyder, Russell Wilcox and Anne Wittman. 18 minutes. Colour. / Jokingly described by its creators as "The Citizen Kane of balloon noir movies" (itself a reference to the Boston Globe's description of Bobcat Goldthwait's ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...