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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Modest Heroes
Japanese animated film (2018). Original title Chīsana Eiyū: Kani to Tamago to Tōmei Ningen. Studio Ponoc. Directors and writers are named below. Voice cast includes Joe Odagiri, Machiko Ono, Sōta Shinohara and Min Tanaka. 53 minutes. Black and white. / Studio Ponoc was founded by Yoshiaki Nishimura, formerly a producer with Studio Ghibli (see Hayao Miyazaki), as were many of the new company's ...
Brooks, Byron A
(1845-1911) US inventor (he invented the shift key for the typewriter) and author of Earth Revisited (1893), a Sleeper Awakes tale which espouses a somewhat garbled revision of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888); the reawakened protagonist, after falling in love with his nurse, realizes that she is the Reincarnation of a lost love. All ends well. [JC]
Firefox
Film (1982). Warner Bros. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Alex Lasker, Wendell Wellman, based on Firefox (1977) by Craig Thomas. Cast includes Warren Clarke, Eastwood, Nigel Hawthorne and Freddie Jones. 136 minutes. Colour. / The sf aspect of the film is a new Russian fighter, the MIG 31 or "Firefox", which can fly at Mach-5 and operates through electronic translation of the pilot's brain patterns – that is, thought control ...
Levack, Daniel J H
(? - ) US bibliographer and critic, author of several author Bibliographies including Fantasms: A Bibliography of the Literature of Jack Vance (1978 chap with Tim Underwood; rev vt Fantasms II 1979 with Underwood and Kurt Cockrum; rev 1979), PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography (1981; rev 1988), ...
Airships
In this encyclopedia the term "airship" is generally used for powered lighter-than-air craft extrapolated from dirigible Balloons and employed as Transportation. However, it seems reasonable also to mention the winged but machine-driven Consolidator featured in Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator (1705), which was soon forgotten, like all Chinese Inventions, ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...