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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Corlett, Anne
(? - ) UK criminal lawyer and author whose first novel after several nonfantastic tales, The Space Between the Stars (2017), attempts with some ambition to use a Space Opera frame to interrogate various practical and moral issues following the virtual elimination of Homo sapiens both on Earth and across a swathe of settled planets (see ...
Leichter, Hilary
(1985- ) US author whose first novel, Temporary (2020), edges into the water margins of Fantastika through its protagonist's surreally transformative search for what, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, she calls "steadiness". Her experiences – for instance as a "human barnacle" – may be read metaphorically, though they are far more illuminating if taken as literal; under the latter strategy, ...
Yasuke
Japanese/US animated online tv series (2021). MAPPA. Created by LeSean Thomas. Directors include Takeru Satō. Written by Flying Lotus, Nick Jones Jr, Alex Larsen and LeSean Thomas. Voice cast includes Darren Criss, Dan Donohue, Amy Hill, Takehiro Hira, Kenji Kitamura, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Julie Marcus, Hiroki Nanami, Yoshiko Sakakibara, Jun Soejima, Lakeith Stanfield, William Christopher Stephens, Kiko Tamura; Rie Tanaka; Maya Tanida, Shigeru Ushiyama and ...
Ball, Frank P
(1908-1970) US solicitor, publisher and author whose self-published Utopia, My Wondrous Dream (1923), may be set in Atlantis, as its protagonist falls asleep while reading Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), though his adventures soon depart radically from any Donnellian hypothesis, taking off from Jonathan ...
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 ...