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Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Lief, Evelyn
(1945- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Inspector" in Clarion (anth 1971) edited by Robin Scott Wilson, though she had sold at least one story earlier, and who published several stories in Anthologies in that decade. Her sf novel, The Clone Rebellion (1980), intended as the start of a series, depicts a world where ...
Brydges, Harold
Working name of UK author James Howard Bridge (1856-1939), in USA from early manhood, whose A Fortnight in Heaven: An Unconventional Romance (1886) conflates sf and the occult in a manner common to much late nineteenth-century work. Able to send his spirit through Time and space, Captain Grizzle visits the planet Jupiter a century hence, finding the civilization there to be an expanded version of life on Earth, with ...
Travel Guides
These occasionally feature in sf, the most famous of all being Douglas Adams's comic creation The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which see) – a guide that gives little space to such minor destinations as Earth, famously listed only as "Harmless" and amended after extensive further research to "Mostly harmless". In older sf, Jack Vance makes witty use of ...
Shaw, Frank H
(1878-1960) UK naval officer and author who was in active service during World War One; he also published stories as by Frank Cleveland, Archibald Guthrie, Grenville Hammerton, Frank Hubert, Ernest Winchfield (and perhaps other names as well), appearing very widely in Boys' Papers from early in the twentieth century, with an estimated 7,000 stories to his credit and seventy or more books. Serials not reissued in book form ...
Villains and Vigilantes
Role Playing Game (1979). Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Designed by Jeff Dee, Jack Herman. / Villains and Vigilantes was the most popular of the early Superhero themed RPGs, despite its inclusion of several design features that now seem questionable. Notably, characters are assigned a random assortment of Superpowers, making it ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...