SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 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.
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Aaron, Shale
Pseudonym of US teacher and author Robert Boswell (1953- ), whose work under his own name is not of genre interest. Virtual Death (1995), his sf novel as by Aaron, interestingly traverses Cyberpunk tropes; the protagonist, an actor who dies on stage for a living (and is later resuscitated), finds herself implicated in a revolutionary conflict engineered by her mother. Computer viruses enter the ...
Diary of Tortov Roddle, The
Japanese animated film series (2003); original title Aru tabibito no nikki. Robot Communications. Created, written and directed by Kunio Kato. Nine 2-6 minute episodes (including three OVAs). Colour. / Tortov Roddle is a lanky young man in top hat, scarf and black coat: his diary records "One day I travelled to the northern plains"; he does so riding a pig whose elongated legs recall Salvador Dalí's Los Elefantes (1948). He witnesses ...
Collier, John
(1901-1980) UK author, poet and short-story author who spent much of his career, after about 1935, in the USA writing filmscripts. He was known mainly for his sophisticated though sometimes rather precious short stories, generally featuring the kind of acerbic snap ending often found in the disillusioned, wary kind of Slick Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] introduced by Saki, who ...
Manster, The
American-Japanese film (1959). Lopert Pictures/Shaw-Breakston Enterprises/United Artists of Japan. Directed by George P Breakston and Kenneth G Crane. Written by George P Breakston, based on a story by William J Sheldon. Cast includes Peter Dyneley, Jane Hylton, Jerry Ito, Tetsu Nakamura, Norman Van Hawley and Terri Zimmern. 72 minutes. Black and white. / Larry Stanford (Dyneley), an American journalist temporarily working in Japan, interviews a Japanese ...
Discworld [series]
Bestselling comic Fantasy Series which is central to the popularity of Terry Pratchett (see his entry for further discussion). The Discworld setting is a flat world (see Flat Earth) supported by four elephants standing atop a giant spacegoing turtle, this whole ensemble complicatedly orbited by the local sun and moon. Beginning with broad ...
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 ...