SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Restif de la Bretonne
Name by which the French author Nicolas-Anne-Edmé Restif (1734-1806) is usually known, though he sometimes signed his books N A E Restif de la Bretonne; his surname at birth was simply Rétif, without the spoof addition, which was the name of a family field. He was an extremely prolific author, publishing about 250 volumes in all beginning in 1767, including many formless, semi-autobiographical novels often attacked for imputed pornographic content. Of his ...
Labonté, Richard
(1949-2022) Canadian author, journalist, book dealer, critic and editor, active in Fandom since the 1960s, often bylined Richard Labonte without the accent. His many LGBT-themed anthologies – three of which won Lambda Literary Awards – include the genre-relevant The Future Is Queer (anth 2006) with Lawrence Schimel, whose contributors include Candas Jane ...
Gingrich, Newt
Working name of US history professor, politician and author Newton Leroy Gingrich (1943- ), Speaker of the House of Representatives 1995-1999, contender in the run-ups to the American presidential election fo 2012, of interest here for his collaborations with William R Forstchen, beginning with 1945 (1995), a Hitler Wins tale in which Germany confronts America after its 1945 victory in ...
Banks, Iain M
(1954-2013) Scottish author who published fiction for the general market as Iain Banks, and works aimed more directly at sf readers as Iain M Banks. Although differences in register can be detected between the two forms of his name, as a whole Banks's work is more usefully thought of as ranging through a wide spectrum, rather than as bifurcating into two separate categories. As in the case of Graham Greene's "real novels" and what he called "Entertainments", ...
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Film (2010). Universal Pictures presents a Marc Platt, Big Talk Films and Closed on Mondays production. Directed by Edgar Wright. Written by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, based on the Scott Pilgrim series of Graphic Novels (2004-2010) by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Cast includes Satya Bhabha, Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh, Keita Saito, Shota Saito, Jason Schwartzman, Mae ...
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 ...