SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 April 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 13 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
High-Rise
Film (2016). Jeremy Thomas and Hanway Films, Film4 and BFI present in association with Northern Ireland Screen, Ingenious Media, Scope Pictures and S Films a Recorded Picture Company production. Directed by Ben Wheatley. Written by Amy Jump from the novel High-Rise (1975) by J G Ballard. Cast includes Julia Deakin, Luke Evans, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Louis Suc. 119 minutes. ...
Smith, Basil A
(1908-1969) UK author and Church of England clergyman; of genre interest are his five stories, unpublished during his lifetime and posthumously assembled as The Scallion Stone (coll 1980); these have been compared to the horror tales of M R James (1862-1936), with whose work he was familiar. Two feature supernatural phenomena with Horror in SF overtones. "The Scallion Stone" (August 1977 Whispers) hints at a tentacled ...
Small Presses and Limited Editions
Any firm founded to release work of personal interest to the publisher, and which distributes that work to readers whose interest can also be assumed, may be called a small press. Four years before Hugo Gernsback began Amazing Stories in 1926, The Lunar Publishing Company of Providence, Kentucky, was founded by friends of the author of the book it had been created in order to publish – and then folded. ...
Memoria
Film (2021), a joint Columbia / UK / Germany / Thailand / Taiwan / US / Mexico project. Kick the Machine, Burning Illuminations Films (Past Lives), Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, Piano, Xstream PIctures, iQIYI Pictures, Titan Creative Entertainment, Rediance, ZDF, Arte, Louverture Films, Doha Film Institute, Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, Bord Cadre Films, Sovereign Films, Field of Vision, 185 Films. Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul ...
Spruill, Steven G
(1946- ) US psychologist and author, who has also written as by Steven Harriman and Steve Lyon. In his first sf novel, Keepers of the Gate (1977; rev 1978), a complicated adventure tale rather in the mode of Keith Laumer, the alien Proteps of Eridani turn out to be an advanced form of Homo sapiens, and have been suppressing mankind's urge to the stars for selfish reasons; the generic cues for revelling in such a ...
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 ...