SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 February 2025
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 11 February 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Bringsværd, Tor Åge
(1939- ) Norwegian author and playwright. Born in the small town of Skien, Bringsværd moved to Oslo to attend university, and there in 1966 met Jon Bing at the first official meeting of the Oslo University sf club, Aniara, created by the initiative of Oddvar Foss; they later contributed by reading aloud stories they had translated. They were both inveterate sf readers in a country where sf literally did not ...
Lesson, The
Armenia animated film (1987). Armenfilm. Directed and written by Robert Sahakyants. 17 minutes. Colour. / The first passenger-carrying starship (see Spaceships) lands on a planet whose flora and fauna mostly resemble portmanteaus of Earth species (see Life on Other Worlds). The trigger-happy tourists begin hunting them, only to find the dead ...
Means, Howard
(? - ) US author of an Alternate History tale, C.S.A.: Confederate States of America (1998), set in the Near Future of a world in which the Confederacy (most implausibly) won the American Civil War. The premise of this alternate timeline is a surprisingly literal application of apartheid between entirely separate but equal Black and white sectors of society, with CSA ...
Metropolis [2]
Japanese animated film (2001; vt Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis). Based on the Manga by Osamu Tezuka. Madhouse. Directed by Rintaro. Written by Katsuhiro Ōtomo. Voice cast includes Yuka Imoto, Tarô Ishida, Kei Kobayashi, Hiroaki Okada, Junpei Takiguchi and Kōsei Tomita. 108 minutes. Colour. / Duke Red (Ishida), a ...
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 ...