SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
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 ...
Reit, Seymour
(1918-2001) US author, well known for having sold to Paramount Studios for $200 all rights to his unpublished story, "The Friendly Ghost"; the Caspar the Friendly Ghost cartoon series made vast sums for its owners. Much of his work, in various genres, fiction and nonfiction, was written for younger children and latterly for the Young Adult market. In Benvenuto (1974), one of his rare fantasies, a boy brings home a dragon (see ...
Underground [Game]
Role Playing Game (1993). Mayfair Games (MG). Designed by Ray Winninger. / Underground is a game in which all the worst fears of US Democrats in the 1990s are brought to life. In this vision of the early twenty-first century, weaponized superhumans turned petty criminals terrorize the cities of a corrupted America. The world is locked in a second Cold War, a hostile stand off between the North American, ...
Finland
Sf in Finland, now over a century old, has been diverse, with few clear-cut lines of development. The earliest story was the serial "Muistelmia matkaltani Ruskealan pappilaan uuden vuoden aikoina vuonna 1983" ["Memoirs of My Trip to the Vicarage of Ruskeala around New Year 1983"] (1883, in the newspaper Aura) by Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson. Apart from a few children's stories, early Finnish sf took the form of future, sometimes socialist, Utopias. The Moon was ...
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 ...