SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 2026
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.
Site updated on 7 July 2026
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Decadence
Although the concept of "decadence", meaning the state of decay to which an institution has fallen after a long period of prosperity, can be dated to the early 1500s, the more modern sense, of an entire culture succumbing to an enervating lack of vitality (or an indulgence in sloth or sensual pleasures), began to emerge only in the nineteenth century. The belief that cultures eventually fall into a debilitating (and usually irreversible) sickness owes much to ...
Time of Eve
Japanese Original Net Animated series (2008-2009; original title Ivu no Jikan), subsequently released as the animated film Time of Eve: The Movie (2010; original title Ivu no Jikan Gekijoban). Studio Rikka. Directed by Yasuhiro Yoshiura. Written by Yasuhiro Yoshiura. Voice cast includes Jun Fukuyama, Kenji Nojima, Mitsuki Saiga, Rina Sato, Tomokazu Sugita, Rie Tanaka and Yuriko Yamaguchi. The animated series had six 15+ minute ...
John W Campbell Memorial Award
Created by Harry Harrison and Brian W Aldiss, this is given annually in July for the best sf novel of the previous year published in English, selected by a committee of academic critics and sf writers. The membership of the jury has undergone a number of changes, and the award has been variously administered from first the USA, then the UK, Ireland, Sweden and then back to the USA at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in ...
de Chair, Somerset
(1911-1995) UK Conservative politician, first elected to Parliament in 1934; his career ended in 1950 after a succession of (heterosexual) scandals. At the start of his long writing career, he published two tracts, The Impending Storm (1930), which predicted World War Two, and Divided Europe (1931), which predicted a Communist takeover of Eastern Europe; Peter Public: A Play in Three Acts (1932) as by the Hon Member ...
Toner, Tom
(1986- ) UK author whose Amaranthine Spectrum sequence, comprising The Promise of the Child (2015), The Weight of the World (2017) and The Tropic of Eternity (2018), is a late but not unwelcome addition to the canon of the Widescreen Baroque Space Opera, with all the conventions typical of such a tale set in an interstellar arena, but conveyed with ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...