SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 14 January 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon)
Teague, Mark
(1963- ) US illustrator and author, almost invariably in both cases for younger children. A series like Cynthia Rylants' Poppleton, for which his illustrations have been admired, is a case in point: written for young readers, it follows the adventures of the eponymous pig after he moves to the big city [the sequence is not listed below]. Of sf interest is an Young Adult tale, The Doom Machine (2009), written and ...
Sapien, Nick
(? - ) US author whose first sf novel, Drosophila (2005), explores a traditional sf topos – the society where social strata are determined by IQ tests, in this case administered at birth by an "IQ machine" – and whose protagonist, employed in Genetic Engineering, smells a rat. Truth City (2011) similarly focuses on a "Truth Machine" which is designed to creat ...
Overpopulation
In 1798 the UK economist Thomas R Malthus (1766-1834) published his Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, arguing that a Utopian situation of peace and plenty would be impossible to achieve because the tendency of populations, in the absence of the checks of war, famine and plague, to increase exponentially would result in society's continually outgrowing its resources. In the second edition of 1803, replying to ...
Cole, Burt
Pseudonym of US author Thomas Dixon (1930- ), best known as the author of The Funco File (1969), in which a world-dominating Computer is pitted against anarchic opposing forces; eccentric and initially useless-seeming Psi Powers are deployed. His other titles of genre interest are Subi: The Volcano (1957), a savage Near Future tale set in an Asia ...
Junk Head
Japanese stop-motion animated film (2017; rev 2021). Yamiken. Directed and written by Takahide Hori. Voice cast includes Takahide Hori and Atsuko Miyake. 100 minutes. Colour. / Initially released as the short film Junk Head 1 (2013), which became the first 30 minutes of the 2017 full-length film discussed here (a revised version of which was released in 2021). Junk Head 1 took four years to produce and was made entirely by the ...
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 ...