SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 March 2023
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.
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Akira
Animated film (1988). Akira Committee. Directed by Katsuhiro Ōtomo, from a screenplay by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, based on the graphic epic Akira (December 1982-June 1990 Young Magazine) by Otomo. Animation studio: Asahi. Chief animator: Takashi Nakamura. 124 minutes. Colour. / In its day Akira was the most successful attempt yet to transfer sophisticated, state-of-the-art Comic-book graphics to ...
Albedo One
Irish low-paying magazine of sf, fantasy and horror fiction which appears irregularly; formerly two or three times per year, latterly once or twice; there was a three-year gap between issue #47 in 2016 and #48 in 2019. First issue, Summer 1993, but undated from issue #4. Originally published by Tachyon Productions, Dublin, Eire, as an A5 booklet, the publisher became Albedo One Productions, Dublin, from issue #12 (1996), and it switched to A4 format. Digital copies in PDF format have also been ...
China Syndrome, The
Film (1979). IPC Films. Directed by James Bridges. Written by Mike Gray, T S Cook, Bridges. Cast includes Wilford Brimley, Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. 122 minutes. Colour. / Made by the production company with which Jane Fonda was associated (Indochina Peace Campaign), this is the first of two crusading borderline-sf films starring her, the other being Rollover (1981). Here she plays a television reporter hoping to do more "hard" ...
North, Edmund H
(1911-1990) US screenwriter and author, who adapted Harry Bates's "Farewell to the Master" (October 1940 Astounding) into a script for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). His only sf novel of interest is a Tie, Meteor (1979) with Franklin Coen, novelizing the feature film ...
Children's SF
For there to exist a term designating a category of fiction written for children, it was necessary to invent a category of human designated as children. "In medieval society, the idea [more properly "feeling"] of childhood did not exist", Philippe Ariès (1914-1984) claimed in L'Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (1960; trans Robert Baldick as Centuries of Childhood 1962). Although this famous over-bald assertion was soon challenged, it ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...