SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 July 2025
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 14 July 2025
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Video Girl Ai
Japanese Anime OVA series (1992); original title Denei Shoujo Ai. I.G. Tatsunoko. Based on the Manga by Masakazu Katsura. Directed by Mizuho Nishikubo. Written by Satoru Akahori, Mayori Sekijima and Kuniaki Yamashita. Voice cast includes Yuri Amano, Megumi Hayashibara, Takeshi Kusao, Kenichi Ogata, Hirotaka Suzuoki and Koji Tsujitani. Six 29-minute episodes. Colour. / Teenager Yota Moteuchi's (Kusao) love for Moemi Hayakawa ...
Carey, Peter
(1943- ) Australian screenwriter and author, once in advertising, an experience that pervades his work; he is generally thought to be the most important living Australia writer, a reckoning which has been received locally with some of the same prickliness that was earlier in evidence when Patrick White (1912-1990) was similarly praised. Carey's screenplays – mostly adaptations of his own books – include a co-credit with Wim Wenders ...
Vernon, Roger Lee
(1924-2017) US schoolteacher and author whose awkwardly routine early sf is contained in an assemblage of original stories, The Space Frontiers (coll 1955), which are mostly Space Opera tales of interplanetary warfare; and the novel Robot Hunt (1959) (see Robots). The very much more recent The Fall of the American Empire – 2013: A Remembrance of Things Future (2010) is told from the year ...
Draulans, Dirk
(1956- ) Belgian biologist and author whose sf novel, De rode koningin: roman over de oorlog tussen man en vrouw (1994; trans Sam Garrett as The Red Queen: A Novel of the War Between the Sexes 1998), presents a Dystopian view of Genetic Engineering, as a ferocious woman (unusual among her ineffective, passive, technologically incompetent kind) hunts down the last fertile ...
Palmer, John
(1885-1944) UK author, known mostly for numerous detective novels and thrillers in collaboration with Hilary Saunders (1898-1951), both writing together as Francis Beeding (for their joint sf see that entry); "bad eyesight" barred him from active service in World War One. The Hesperides: A Looking-Glass Fugue (1936) by Palmer solo is a Satire in the style of the ...
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 ...