SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 6 December 2023
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 4 December 2023
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Compton, D G
(1930-2023) UK author, born of parents who were both in the theatre; he increasingly lived in the USA after 1981. As Guy Compton, he published some unremarkable detective novels, beginning with Too Many Murderers (1962), and as by Frances Lynch produced some nonfantastic Gothics throughout his career; but soon turned to sf with tales almost always set in the Near Future, and anatomizing moral dilemmas within that arena: the future is very clearly ...
Firestone, Shulamith
(1945-2012) Canadian-born painter, activist and author, resident in the United States from childhood, who was a founding figure in radical Feminism, and a key thinker in the movement in late-1960s New York. / Firestone outlined her ideas in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), which argued, among other points, that women would not be truly liberated until they were freed from the shackles of ...
Shinjō Kazuma
(? - ) Japanese author whose early success came in 1991 with a Tie to a Play-by-Mail game: Hōrai Gakuen ["Penglai Academy"] set at a huge, 100,000-strong school of duellists and schemers, itself on an offshore island that takes its name from that of the "isles of the immortals" in Chinese legend. His subsequent work has largely ...
Identity Transfer
Transfer of the personality or Identity from one body to another is a popular sf theme, whether justified by Cartesian dualism (positing an immaterial personality or soul capable of existing independently of the body) or by the Computer analogy in which the mind is software running on the body's hardware or wetware. The protagonist of A E van Vogt's The World of Ā (August-October 1945 ...
Paprika
Film (2006). Sony Pictures Entertainment presents a Madhouse Production. Directed by Satoshi Kon. Written by Satoshi Kon and Seishi Minakami, based on the novel Paprika (1993) by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Cast (voice only) includes Tōru Emori, Tōru Furuya, Megumi Hayashibara, Katsunosuke Hori, Akio Ōtsuka, Daisuke Sakaguchi and Kōichi Yamadera. Music by Susumu ...
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 ...