SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 17 June 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 15 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Bateman, Robert
(1922-1973) UK author, primarily involved in radio and television work. It is tentatively presumed that the three books here described are by this Robert Bateman (there are several). His version of The Hands of Orlac (1961) novelizes the 1960 film, which is based with some remoteness on the original novel, Les mains d'Orlac (15 May-12 July 1920 L'Intransigeant; 1921; trans as The Hands of Orlac 1929; new trans 1981) by Maurice ...
Beyond Good & Evil
Videogame (2003). Ubisoft. Designed by Michel Ancel. Platforms: PS2 (2003); GC, XBox (2004); Win (2006); PS3, XB360 (2011). / Beyond Good & Evil is an action Adventure, displayed in a third person three-dimensional view. It is set on Hillys, a colony planet inhabited by humans and anthropomorphic aliens. Hillys is beautiful and peaceful, a harmonious world where even the criminals are ...
LOLA
UK/Irish film (2022). Cowtown Pictures, Headgear Films, Kreo Films FZ. Directed by Andrew Legge. Written by Legge and Angeli MacFarlane; story by Henrietta Ashworth, Jessica Ashworth and Legge. Cast includes Emma Appleton, Rory Fleck Byrne, Aaron Monaghan and Stefanie Martini. 79 minutes. Black and white. / An opening caption tells us that in 2021 some reels of film were discovered in a country house in Sussex. What we see is that film. Two sisters, Thom (Appleton) and Mars (Martini) ...
Sinclair, Carl
(? - ) New Zealand-born UK author, for whose sf novel Sixth Cycle (2014) with Darren Wearmouth, see his collaborator. In his second novel, Escalation Force (2015), a deadly Weapon is discovered in an Underground cache dating back to World War Two. [JC]
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 ...