SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 28 January 2022
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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Gerard, Louise
(1878-1970) UK author, almost exclusively of romances, some of them literally bodice-rippers, featuring heroines who are frequently abducted, bound, raped, and who then fall in love with the aristocratic perp; her first novel, The Golden Centipede (1910), features, on the other hand, a dominatrix white queen, a She figure who rules a Lost Race in the heart of darkest Africa. [JC]
Famous Films
Letter-size perfect-bound Cinema magazine printed on cheap newsprint. Publisher: Warren Publishing. Editor: Russ Jones. Three issues, all in 1964. / Famous Films was apparently the first US Media Magazine to adapt Horror and sf films in photonovel or fumetti form, a practice which was to become very common for some years from the mid-1970s. The adapted stories used numerous black-and-white photographs with attached dialogue captions in the style of Comics speech balloons. Early choices were ...
Simpson, Helen
(1897-1940) Australian playwright and author, mostly in the UK from April 1914; she was employed as a message decoder in World War One. In 1919 she founded the Oxford Women's Dramatic Society, but was sent down by the university for appearing on stage with a man. The Baseless Fabric (coll 1925) assembles supernatural and weird fiction; Mumbudget (coll 1928) assembles fairy tales. John Dee's recounting of transactions between levels of reality shapes the seventeenth-century Puritan protagonist's ...
Space Dandy
Japanese animated tv series (2014). Bones. Directed by Shingo Natsume and Shinichirō Watanabe. Writers include Toh Enjoe, Keiko Nobumoto, Dai Sato, Kimiko Ueno and Shinichiro Watanabe. Voice cast includes Unshou Ishizuka, Uki Satake, Junichi Suwabe, Masaaki Yajima and Hiroyuki Yoshino. 26 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Bequiffed letch Space Dandy (Suwabe) and his long-suffering companion, the AI vacuum cleaner QT (Satake), tour the Galaxy hoping to discover new Alien species: the reward ...
Lin Yutang
Working name of Chinese-US author, essayist and academic Lin Yü-t'ang (1895-1976), his most important scholarly achievement (in strong contrast to his many volumes of popularized wisdom) being the Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (1972). In his one sf novel, The Unexpected Island (1955; vt Looking Beyond 1955), refugees from several world Holocausts establish a conservative Ruined Earth Utopia on an isolated Island. [JC]
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 ...