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Thursday 12 March 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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Ray, Satyajit
(1921-1992) Indian film-maker and author, best known in the former capacity; beginning with Pather Panchali (1955), he made about thirty feature films, and is generally recognized as the finest Indian director to date. His fiction, much less well known outside India, was generally restricted to series of tales, including the Feluda sequence [not listed below] of detective stories featuring a Sherlock Holmes figure, accompanied by a ...
Antena, La
["The Aerial"] Film (2007). Dogwoof presents a LaDobleA production. Written and directed by Esteban Sapir. Cast includes Valeria Bertuccelli, Julieta Cardinali, Rafael Ferro, Raúl Hochman, Sol Moreno, Carlos Piñeiro, Florencia Raggi, Jonathan Sandor and Alejandro Urdapilleta. 99 minutes. Black and white. / This almost-silent film from Argentina uses the long-standing connection between early Cinema and the ...
Stevenson, D E
(1892-1973) Scottish author of many romances and other works. Her only sf is The Empty World (A Romance of the Future) (1936; vt A World in Spell 1939), a Scientific Romance in which, after a Holocaust – in this case a Comet strike – has eliminated almost the whole of humanity; a small group of survivors must work out how to cope with their ...
Shaw, Barclay
(1949- ) American artist. After brief employment as a sculptor and woodworker, Shaw received additional training at the New England School of Art and Design and did some freelance work in advertising before moving into sf art. He began his career in 1979 with two covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (to be followed by several more) as well as one for Cinefantastique, and he was soon ...
Terminology
Newcomers to sf are occasionally dismayed by its jargon. Certain concepts have become so useful in sf (and also in talking about it) that they tend to be referred to – especially by Genre-SF writers – in a kind of shorthand and without explanation. Many receive entries in this volume, sometimes brief (see Credits; FTL), sometimes detailed (see Androids; ...
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 ...