SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 10 April 2026
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 6 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Yasuke
Japanese/US animated online tv series (2021). MAPPA. Created by LeSean Thomas. Directors include Takeru Satō. Written by Flying Lotus, Nick Jones Jr, Alex Larsen and LeSean Thomas. Voice cast includes Darren Criss, Dan Donohue, Amy Hill, Takehiro Hira, Kenji Kitamura, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Julie Marcus, Hiroki Nanami, Yoshiko Sakakibara, Jun Soejima, Lakeith Stanfield, William Christopher Stephens, Kiko Tamura; Rie Tanaka; Maya Tanida, Shigeru Ushiyama and ...
Rockets
The Chinese were using skyrockets as fireworks in the eleventh century, and adapted them as Weapons of War in the thirteenth. Europeans borrowed the idea, but rocket-missiles were abandoned as muskets and rifles became more efficient. According to Willy Ley in Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere (1944), a fifteenth-century Chinese legend tells of one Wan-Hoo, who attached rockets to ...
Forbes, Caroline
(1952- ) UK author whose first story of genre interest, "Snake" (1980 publication not traced), was assembled with her other published fantasy and sf in The Needle on Full: Lesbian Feminist Science Fiction (coll 1985) (see Feminism; Women in SF). Told with an abstractedness that seems at time fatally distant from the world, the tales here assembled convey all the same an acute awareness of feminist ...
Meacham, Beth
(1951- ) US author and editor, married to Tappan King from 1978. She worked first as an sf bookseller before joining Ace Books in 1981, where she developed the careers of Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card and Tim Powers, among others; she also discovered James P Blaylock and oversaw ...
Nueva Dimensión
["New Dimension"] The most important and longest-running sf magazine in Spain, published by Domingo Santos, Luis Vigil and Sebastián Martínez. Nueva Dimensión (1968-1983), popularly known as ND, published 148 regular issues, five extra issues and issued several collections of books. The schedule was initially bimonthly and changed to monthly after issue #20. It began with 168 pages that were reduced ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...