SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 March 2026
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 9 March 2026
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Tolkien, J R R
(1892-1973) South-African-born philologist, translator, poet and author, in UK from 1893, who specialized in early forms of English; his academic career was crowned by his appointment as Merton Professor of English at Oxford University in 1945, a post he held until his retirement in 1959. He specialized as a scholar in early forms of English – his early publications include A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans 1925) with ...
Future Boy Conan
Japanese animated tv series (1978; vt Conan, The Boy in Future). Original title Mirai Shōnen Konan. Based on the novel The Incredible Tide (1970) by Alexander Key. Nippon Animation. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Written by Satoshi Kurumi, Akira Nakano and Sōji Yoshikawa. Voice cast includes Iemasa Kayumi, Ichirô Nagai, Mieko Nobusawa, Noriko Ohara, ...
Soane, John
(1753-1837) UK architect and author, active in the first capacity from the early 1770;, now perhaps best known for his forty-five years with the Bank of England, for which he served as architect and builder of its paradigm headquarters (scandalously demolished between 1920 and 1939). Along with earlier paintings by Joseph Gandy (1771-1843), he commissioned "A Bird's-eye View of the Bank of England" (1830), which depicts the bank in ruins at some point in the moderately distant future (see ...
Armstrong, Luanne
(1949- ) Canadian teacher, poet and author, active from the mid-1990s in various genres, including stories for younger children; her studies of rural life in British Columbia (not listed below) are strongly felt. The Bone House (2002), her first tale of sf interest, is set in a Near Future British Columbia devastated first by Climate Change and second by corporate ...
Silent Running
Film (1971). Universal. Directed by Douglas Trumbull. Written by Deric Washburn, Mike Cimino and Steve Bocho, from a story by Trumbull. Cast includes Bruce Dern. 90 minutes. Colour. / All plant life on Earth has been destroyed in the aftermath of a nuclear Holocaust; only vast orbiting Spaceships like Valley Forge, with its external hydroponic domes, still contain ...
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 ...