SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 April 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 6 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Linbach, Gustave
Joint pseudonym of UK playwright and librettist Henry Edlin (? -? ), active in the 1890s, and the editor Lionel Courtier-Dutton (1847-1901), whose own pseudonym was Charles Lionel Carson; their early Scientific Romance, The Azrael of Anarchy (1894), is set in a Near Future England subverted by an anarchist conspiracy against the realm led by the menacing half-Indian Sir Dunstan ...
1984
Film (1955). Holiday Film Productions. Directed by Michael Anderson. Written by William P Templeton, Ralph Bettinson, based on Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell. Cast includes Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasence, Michael Redgrave and Jan Sterling. 91 minutes. Black and white. / After the success of a 1954 BBC TV production of Nineteen Eighty-Four, scripted by Nigel ...
Eden of the East
Japanese animated tv series (2009). Original title Higashi no Eden. Production I.G. Written and directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Voice cast includes Hiroshi Arikawa, Saori Hayami, Ryohei Kimura and Sakiko Tamagawa. Eleven 23-minute episodes. Colour. / In the then Near Future of 2011, Saki Morimi (Hayami), a young Japanese tourist, meets a naked and Amnesiac young man (Kimura) outside the White ...
Sense of Wonder
A term used to describe the sensation which, according to the Cliché of fan criticism that goes back at least to the 1940s, good sf should inspire in the reader. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) Darko Suvin summed up the attitude of many critics by describing the term as "another superannuated slogan of much SF criticism due for a deserved retirement into the same limbo as extrapolation". And yet ... / ...
Itäranta, Emmi
(1976- ) Finnish journalist, scriptwriter and author, resident in England, who either translates into or writes the original manuscripts of her novels in English; her first novel, Teemestarin kirja ["The Book of the Master of Tea"] (2012; English version by author as Memory of Water 2014), is a Young Adult tale set in a Dystopian seemingly distant ...
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 ...