SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 21 September 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 17 September 2024
Sponsor of the day: Janine G Stinson
Interstella 5555
Film (2003). Toei Animation/Virgin Music. Directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi. Cast includes Thomas Bangalter and Romanthony. Written by Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Cédric Hervet. 65 minutes. Colour. / Billed as "the animated House Musical", Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem – to give it its full and unwieldy title – is an extremely unusual film: a feature length anime adaptation of Daft Punk's ...
Kashiwaba Sachiko
(1953- ) Japanese author, largely of fantasy fiction for children and Young Adults, beginning with Kiri no Mukō no Fushigi-na Machi (1975; trans Christopher Holmes as The Marvelous Village Veiled in Mist 1987), in which the titular Brigadoon-like Polder [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], where local ...
Doughty, Charles M
(1843-1926) UK explorer and author whose Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) profoundly influenced T E Lawrence (1888-1935), among others. The increasingly difficult, archaic language of Doughty's later work, a series of book-length poems, as well as the austerity of their arguments, has kept them from as wide acclaim as his great work on Arabia, which was not only hypnotically written, but also deeply reliable as an anthropological and geographical dissection of a virtually unknown ...
Ray, René
Pseudonym of UK actor and author Irene Creese (1911-1993), in whose sf novel, The Strange World of Planet X (1957), romance and a Mad Scientist becomes mixed with the fourth Dimension. It was written to novelize her own television series, The Strange World of Planet X, although there are differences in plot, which differences are replicated in the 1958 film ...
Horror in SF
The often propounded notion that sf is a literature of rational, scientifically based extrapolation is at best misleading and in many instances false. Much sf is anti-science, for reasons partly historic and perhaps partly intrinsic: the relationship of Fantastika as a whole to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was uneasy from the very first. The famous remark of the Spanish painter Goya (1746-1828) that the Sleep of Reason breeds Monsters is inarguable in its ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...