SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 December 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Common Side Effects
US animated tv series (2025). Green Street Pictures. Created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely. Directed by Camille Bozec, Sean Buckelew and Vincent Tsui. Writers include Steve Hely. Voice cast includes Joseph Lee Anderson, Danny Huston, Mike Judge, Martha Kelly, Dave King, Emily Pendergast and Sue Rose. Ten 23-minute episodes. Colour. / After protesting the environmental damage (see Ecology) in Peru caused by pharmaceutical company Reutical, Marshall Cuso ...
China
For a general note on this encyclopedia's handling of Chinese names, please see Editorial Practices: Chinese and Japanese Names. / Chinese literature has a long tradition of the fantastic that prepared the way for, and leads up to, modern Chinese sf. Like modernism itself, the sf genre reached China through the unexpected route of Japanese contacts, in particular the foreign studies of the author Lu ...
Wren, M K
(1938-2016) US author who initially concentrated on mysteries, the Conan Flagg series being nonfantastic. Her Phoenix Legacy trilogy – Sword of the Lamb (1981), Shadow of the Swan (1981) and House of the Wolf (1981) – uses a carefully thought out Future History to justify an intricate plot which compounds together Space Opera, romance and political thriller ...
Deadly Mantis, The
Film (1957). Universal-International Pictures. Produced by William Alland. Directed by Nathan Juran. Written by Martin Berkeley and Alland (uncredited). Cast includes William Hopper, Craig Stevens and Alix Talton. 79 minutes. Black and white. / A volcano erupts in the Southern Pacific, somehow causing a break-up of ice near the North Pole which frees a 200-foot-long prehistoric praying mantis (see Great and Small) from a state of ...
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 ...