SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 21 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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Friedberg, Gertrude
(1908-1989) US author who also taught. Her career as a playwright began early, with Three Cornered Moon (1933), which was later filmed, but she began publishing sf only in April 1963, with "The Short and Happy Death of George Frumkin" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her fine sf novel The Revolving Boy (1966) strikingly tells the story of a child sensitive from his unique birth in free fall to signals, possibly ...
Yellow Peril
The popular Term, not only within sf circles, for military or economic expansionism by China and other Far Eastern nations (see Invasion; Politics) as seen through the distorting lens of Western Paranoia, and understandable in those terms as central to the language and fears expressed in Imperial Gothic in the years before ...
Long Night
Term used by Poul Anderson in his Technic History sequence to denote the galactic Dark Ages expected after the fall of a Terran Galactic Empire already mired in Decadence, a narrative of Decline and Fall and the Darkness to come that comprises a central thread in the megatext (see SF Megatext) of the West, as exemplified in the twentieth century by Arnold J ...
Dogora
Japanese film (1964; original title Uchû daikaijû Dogora; vt Dagora, the Space Monster; vt Space Monster Dogora). Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Jojiro Okami and Shinichi Sekizawa. Cast includes Robert Dunham, Nobuo Nakamura and Yosuke Natsuki. 83 minutes. Colour. / Japanese Scientists monitoring an orbiting television satellite witness its swallowing by a giant blue amoeba; it ...
Pringle, Eric
(1935-2017) UK screenwriter and author connected in his earlier career with the Doctor Who universe, for which he wrote a Tie, Doctor Who – The Awakening (1985). Later he chiefly concentrated on Radio work, though his Big George sequence for younger children, beginning with Big George (2001), amusingly retells the legend of Saint George and the Dragon in sf terms, with 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 ...