SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 March 2023
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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Perry, Roger
Pseudonym of UK author Roger William Cowern (1928- ), author of three undemanding Space Operas for Robert Hale Limited: Senior Citizen (1979), The Making of Jason (1980) and Esper's War (1981). [JC]
They Were Eleven
Japanese animated film (1986; original title Jūichinin Iru!; vt We Were Eleven). Magic Bus. Based on the Manga by Moto Hagio. Directed by Satoshi Dezaki and Tsuneo Tominaga. Written by Toshiaki Imaizumi and Kazumi Koide. Voice cast includes Akira Kamiya and Michiko Kawai. 91 minutes. Colour. / Over several centuries humanity has achieved ...
Holly, Joan Hunter
A late working name of US author Joan Carol Holly (1932-1982), who before 1970 signed herself J Hunter Holly. She had a degree in psychology and conducted creative-writing workshops as well as doing her own work; a benign brain tumour, removed in 1970, interrupted her career 1966-1970, and she later suffered further ill health. She began publishing sf with a novel, Encounter (1959), in which Man and inimical Alien confront one another. Much of her work ...
Curtis, Jean-Louis
Pseudonym of French author Louis Lafitte (1917-1995), author of several untranslated works, none fantastic; his collection of five satirical sf stories, Un saint au néon (coll 1956; trans by Humphrey Hare as The Neon Halo: The Face of the Future 1958), very sharply depicts a Near-Future world whose centre cannot hold. The tone is vivacious, didactic, circumstantial; its wit is distanced in the récit fashion long ...
Pink Floyd
Prodigiously successful and influential UK supergroup, founded in the mid 1960s by bassist Roger Waters (1943- ), drummer Nick Mason (1944- ), keyboard player Rick Wright (1943-2008) and eccentric singer-guitarist Syd Barrett (1946-2006). This first incarnation of the band (identified by fans as "The Syd Barrett years") was characterized by a series of notable psychedelic and often drug-influenced live performances, mostly jazz-influenced rock ...
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 ...