SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 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.
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Rameau, Jean
Pseudonym of French author Laurent Labaigt (1858-1942), who first became well-known with the contes cruels assembled in Fantasmagories, histoires rapides ["Phantasmagorias: Rapid Tales"] (coll 1887), which contains some of the best examples of his very large output (reportedly 5,000 short stories in all); though condensed into a kind of surreal pointillism, sf motifs – the use of electricity as a universal Power Source, and portraits ...
Cárdenas, Juan
(1978- ) Colombian translator, editor and author, active from around 2005; he is primarily of sf interest for his third novel, Ornamento (2015; trans Lizzie Davis as Ornamental 2020), which is built around what happens to four separate women subject to an experimental study using a highly addictive Drug that affects women only. The doctor responsible becomes deeply involved with one of the experimental studies, who ...
Game Design
While the practice of game design has no direct relationship to sf, a brief section on the subject has been included here to define and clarify concepts used elsewhere. / Although new Games have been created throughout recorded history, the first attempts at a theory of game design do not seem to have emerged until the early 1970s, among board and counter Wargame developers. The term "game designer" itself, referring to the profession of ...
Christie, Douglas
(1894-1935) UK author who also published some work as by Colin Campbell, and thrillers as by Lynn Durie like This Yellow Slave (1933); his sf novel is The Striking Force: A Story of the North-West Frontier (1935), where Religion and Politics mix to create an unstable Near Future for Britain. [JC]
Fagan, Jim
(? - ) Australian author of Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967), which is Tied to the film of the same name (which see): Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967; vt Those Fantastic Flying Fools US; vt Rocket to the Moon). [JC/DRL]
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 ...