SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 7 June 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 4 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Cells at Work! Code Black
Japanese animated tv series (2021). Original title Hataraku Saibō Black. Based on the Manga by Shigemitsu Harada and Issei Hatsuyoshi. Liden Films. Directed by Hideyo Yamamoto. Written by Hayashi Mori. Voice cast includes Junya Enoki and Yōko Hikasa. Thirteen 24-minute episodes. Colour. / A spinoff of the Cells at Work! manga and Anime created by Akane ...
Space Flight
Flight into space is the classic theme in sf. The lunar romances of Francis Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac et al. are the works most commonly and readily identified as Proto SF. In modern times, as Genre SF spilled out of print into the Cinema, Radio and Television, ...
Forbes, Alexander
(1882-1965) US author whose sf novel, The Radio Gunner (1924) as Anonymous, depicts a Future War set in 1937 between Northern Europe, in alliance with the USA, and the Constantinople Coalition. Forbes's predictive powers were not strong, and his eponymous hero, who knows how to locate radio equipment with his special device, fails to enthral. [JC]
Benét, William Rose
(1886-1950) US anthologist, editor, poet and author, brother of Stephen Vincent Benét; most famous as editor for founding in 1924 and editing until his death the Saturday Review of Literature, and for The Reader's Encyclopedia (1948; often revised). He is of modest sf interest for The Flying King of Kurio: A Story for Children (1926), a portal fantasy whose protagonists enter a secondary world unusually high in ...
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 ...