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Wednesday 16 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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Gibbons, Stella
(1902-1989) UK journalist, poet and author, active from the early 1920s. Perhaps unfairly, she remains known almost exclusively for her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), set in a moderately explicit Near Future, sometime after the 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, when public videophones and private airplanes are common. The story itself, a savagely comic Parody of epiphany-choked rural novels as written by D H Lawrence ...
Balsdon, Dacre
(1901-1977) academic, historian and author, who signed his nonfiction as J P V D Balsdon, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford 1927-1969; his sf novels are humorous Satires on contemporary mores, little allowance being made for technological, social or behavioural change. The most imaginative, Sell England? (1936), is a Dystopia set 1000 years hence in which the UK is inhabited solely by a decadent aristocracy, while the other ...
Converse, Frank H
(1843-1889) US author for American Boys' Papers whose main work of sf interest Van: or, In Search of an Unknown Race (1 October-31 December 1887 The Golden Argosy; 1891; vt In Search of an Unknown Race 1901), a Lost Race tale featuring an Incan civilization in the Andes. Happy-Go-Lucky Jack (1901) is a lost race tale for children. [JC]
Kenneth-Brown, Kenneth
Working name of US journalist and author Kenneth Brown (1868-? ), some of whose work was set in a romanticized Orient; his Young Adult sf novel, Two Boys in a Gyrocar: The Story of a New York to Paris Motor Race (1911), on the other hand, stays closer to home, depicting a Near Future aerial contest whose young protagonists' Invention allows them to traverse the Atlantic ...
Nichijou
Japanese animated tv series (2011; vt Nichijou: My Ordinary Life). Based on the Manga by Keiichi Arawi. Kyoto Animation. Directed by Tatsuya Ishihara, Written by Jukki Hanada. Voice cast includes Mai Aizawa, Shizuka Furuya, Mariko Honda, Chika Horikawa, Yoshihisa Kawahara, Hiromi Konno, Kaoru Mizuhara, Minoru Shiraishi and Misuzu Togashi. 26 25-minute episodes and one OVA. Colour. / Attending Tokisadame High School are the ...
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 ...