SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 13 May 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.
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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Frankenstein [2025]
US film (2025). Double Dare You Films, Demilo Films, Bluegrass 7, Netflix. Written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro, based on Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Cast includes Charles Dance, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Oscar Isaacs, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen and Christoph Waltz. 150 minutes. Colour. / The story is the ...
Schreiner, Olive
(1855-1920) South African social theorist and author who remains best known for her first novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883) as by Ralph Iron, which casts a clear unfavourable light on the role of Religion in cementing Imperialist claims to ethical superiority over conquered civilizations. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), with its reportedly censured frontispiece showing a lynched black ...
West, Pamela
(1945- ) US author whose novel, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1987), is nonfantastic; her sf novel, 20/20 Vision (1990), is an intricate Time-Travel tale in which a murder in 1995 is brooded over by a detective in 2020 and solved through the agency of time-travelling archivists from 2040, who send the detective back – via a form of Computer-enhanced ...
Xiang Kairan
(1889-1957) Chinese author of several influential novels and essays, some as by Pingjiang Buxiaosheng, which dragged the genre of Wuxia out of the dreamtime of the nineteenth century, and towards a more modern form with nationalist and patriotic leanings. Dubbed "the father of martial arts fiction" by the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (2016), Xiang was enmeshed in the radical movement to create a new and modern ...
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 ...