SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Fies, Brian
(? - ) US cartoonist and author whose Graphic Novel, Whatever Happened to The World of Tomorrow? (graph 2009), dramatizes the American dream of a Technology-led drive towards a Utopian future centred on a continuous move into space. The narrative traces from 1939 on a recognizable sf advocacy of early ...
Mellick, Carlton, III
(1977- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Playroom" in Parchment Symbols for December 1999. He has been recognized as the central creator of what he may himself have dubbed Bizarro Fiction (not connected to the earlier Marvel Comics Supervillain Bizarro or the DC Comics Bizarro world), a term which describes stories whose narratives are ...
Miyazawa Kenji
(1896-1933) Japanese poet and author, overlooked in his lifetime but posthumously emblematic of Fantastika in Japan's long 1920s, and cherished as a pacifist, internationalist thinker of the pre-war period. Graduating from Morioka Agriculture and Forestry College in 1918, Miyazawa was an early supporter of organic foods and fertilizers, a strict vegetarian, and after 1926 an ardent proponent of Esperanto, into which he translated some of ...
Mantley, John
(1920-2003) Canadian-born US screenwriter and producer whose Near Future sf novel, The Twenty-Seventh Day (1956; rev 1956), features Galactic Federation Aliens who give each of five humans from opposing countries an invincible weapon in 1963 to see what they do with them. The novel was filmed – from the US version, which has a revised ending – as The 27th Day ...
Mort en direct, La
French/West German film (1979; vt Death Watch). Selta Film/Little Bear/Sara Film/Gaumont/Antenne 2/TV 15. Coproduced and directed by Bernard Tavernier. Written by David Rayfiel, Tavernier, based on The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974; rev vt The Unsleeping Eye 1974; vt Death Watch 1981) by D G Compton. Cast includes Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider, ...
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 ...