SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Interviews with Monster Girls
Japanese animated tv series (2017). Original title Demi-chan wa Kataritai. A-1 Pictures. Based on the Japanese Manga by Petosu. Directors include Ryō Andō. Written by Petosu and Takao Yoshioka. Voice cast includes Yōko Hikasa, Kaede Hondo, Shiina Natsukawa, Minami Shinoda and Junichi Suwabe. Thirteen 22-minute episodes. Colour. / Biology teacher Tetsuo Takahashi (Suwabe) learns that ...
Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference
1. Annual writers' workshop founded in 1956, held at Milford, Pennsylvania, where several sf authors – including one of the Milford founders, Damon Knight – lived at various times. (A writers' workshop – see also Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop – includes sessions of mutual criticism of not yet published stories, interspersed with discussion groups on various ...
Lott, S Makepeace
Working name of UK author Stanley Makepeace-Lott (1920-1991), whose Escape to Venus (1956) is an Orwell-influenced Dystopian view of a Venus colony established sixty years after the outbreak of World War Three in 1980. [JE]
Wells, Robert
(1929-2021) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Machine That Was Lonely" in the Observer in 1954, one of that newspaper's prize competition stories assembled as A.D. 2500: The Observer Prize Stories (anth 1954) edited anonymously. Wells later concentrated on novels, beginning with The Parasaurians (1969), in which fake safaris against Robot Dinosaurs turn into a more serious threat to the hero ...
Galactic Lens
This term, from Astronomy, makes frequent appearance in sf. It refers to the fact that our Galaxy is (like many others) approximately lens-shaped – it is a disc containing spiral arms, but like a lens it has a central bulge. Our own position in the Galaxy is quite a long way from the core; when we look towards the centre of the "lens", the direction in which the stars are clustered most thickly, we see the so-called Milky Way. Towards the outer rim of the ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...