SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 14 January 2025
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.
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Acworth, Andrew
(1857-1895) UK author – according to Darko Suvin, a barrister named Andrew Oswald Acworth – whose sf novel, A New Eden (1896), set 100 years in the future, features the escape of two depressed protagonists from the decaying republican UK, which has suffered from Devolution of the human stock, to an egalitarian but hidebound Island Utopia which fails ...
Great Wall, The
Chinese film (2016; vt Chang Cheng). Legendary East, Le Vision, Atlas Entertainment, China Film Group, Universal Pictures. Directed by Zhang Yimou, starring Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Jing Tian, Andy Lau. Written by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy. 104 minutes. Colour. / In the eleventh century CE, William (Damon) and Tovar (Pascal) are the last survivors of a group of European mercenaries who have made the long journey to China ...
Slater, Philip
(1927-2013) US academic (who abandoned his career as a professor of sociology in 1971), actor, playwright and author who remains best known for such acute analyses of Western culture as The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) and Earthwalk (1974). His How I Saved the World (1985), about nuclear Disaster, reiterates in spoof-thriller guise the lessons urged in his nonfiction; en passant he mocks conspiracy theories, occult ...
Puni Puni Poemy
Japanese original video animation series (2001); original title Puni Puni ☆ Poemii. J.C.Staff. Directed by Shinichi Watanabe. Written by Yōsuke Kuroda. Voice cast includes Yuka Imai, Ryu Itou and Yumiko Kobayashi. Two 30-minute episodes. Colour. / After her parents and Robot dog are crucified by an Alien with odd genitals, schoolgirl Poemi Watanabe (Kobayashi) moves in with her friend ...
Singleton, Linda Joy
(1957- ) US author of paranormal romances for the Young Adult market, including the My Sister, the Ghost sequence, the Seer sequence and the Dead Girl sequence (none of these are listed below). Of sf interest is the Regeneration sequence beginning with Regeneration (2000) as L J Singleton, whose five volumes follow the fraught childhood and adolescence of five Clones ...
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 ...