SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 8 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Christian, Deborah
(1956- ) US author whose first novel, Mainline (1996), is an sf thriller involving much action in Parallel Worlds; the protagonist possesses a limited Psi-based ability to shift from one reality to another, in the course of committing industrial espionage through "back doors", but if she shifts too far cannot find her way back. Complications ensue when she falls in love, and attempts to keep ...
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends
US animated tv series (2004-2009). Cartoon Network Studios. Created by Craig McCracken. Directors include Robert Alvarez, Robert Cullen, Craig McCracken, Randy Myers and Eric Pringle. Writers include Darrick Bachman, Lauren Faust, Craig Lewis and Tim McKeon. Voice cast includes Grey DeLisle, Keith Ferguson, Tom Kane, Sean Marquette. 79 22-minute episodes and eighteen shorts. Colour. / Aged eight, Mac (Marquette) is getting too old to have an ...
Wyss, Johann David Von
(1743-1818) Swiss philosopher and author, of sf interest for Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812-1813; trans William Godwin as The Family Robinson Crusoe 1814) [for subtitles of original and trans see Checklist below], a nonfantastic tale which nevertheless – together with the tale which inspired it, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) – served as a central model for sf tales of the ...
Kuang, R F
(1996- ) Chinese-born translator and author, in US from the age of four. Her ambitious fantasy sequence, The Poppy War series beginning with The Poppy War (2018), casts the twentieth-century story of China as an intensely complex but coherent drama with a large cast and much War. The anguish of lives conducted in the midst of history is conveyed with enough detail and analogy that it is possible to ...
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 ...