SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 July 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 13 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Maison en Petits Cubes, La
Japanese short animated film (2008; vt The House of Small Cubes); original title Tsumiki no Ie. Robot Communications. Created and directed by Kunio Katō. Written by Kenya Hirata. 12 minutes. Colour. / An old man lives on the top floor of an otherwise submerged building; over the decades he has added several new floors as the waters continue to very slowly rise – though the floodwaters stretch to the horizon, an infrastructure exists ...
Wise, David
(1930-2018) US author and journalist, with the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, whose works include both fiction and nonfiction about espionage and US politics. Of sf interest is The Samarkand Dimension (1987), a spy thriller in which Soviet sabotage of a US ICBM launch test has disastrous results and is ascribed to Psi Powers, the enemy having overridden the course controls via Telekinesis. The ...
Beeton, Samuel Orchart
(1831-1877) UK publisher, editor, poet and author, married from 1856 to Isabella Mary Mason (1836-1865), with whom he produced Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861), the book for which they remain best remembered. Beeton began his career as a publisher with Charles H Clarke in 1852, as C H Clarke & Co; at Beeton's instigation, they came out with the first English edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), which both brought ...
Kahaney, Amelia
(? - ) US author whose Young Adult Near Future Brokenhearted sequence beginning with The Brokenhearted (2013), and set in a Dystopian version of New York here called Bedlam, puts more emphasis on the romantic element than perhaps normal in this kind of fiction. The mandatory love triangle soon turns violent: the ...
Spacesuit Films
Spacesuit films, as defined by the critic who has promoted the term, Gary Westfahl, are those space films that endeavour to plausibly portray the harsh conditions and novel features of life in outer space and on other planets – such as the absence of air, zero or low Gravity, and dangerous radiation – as most prominently indicated by the fact that their characters constantly wear, or are in close proximity to, protective ...
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 ...