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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Miniaturization
A favourite area of Imaginary Science in sf is the shrinking or other transference of living protagonists to miniature, microscopic or even subatomic stature, leading to adventures at the appropriate scale (see Great and Small). Scientific rationales for the process are not easy to construct, since the major obstacles include the basic Physics of mass/energy conservation. Thus authors may ...
Barker, Jim
(? - ) Scots artist active in Fandom since the mid-1970s, contributing many cartoons to Fanzines including Maya (there often illustrating humorous essays and speeches by Bob Shaw) and occasionally Ansible and Vector. Some early work was signed with the anagrammatic pseudonym J Mike Barr. His ...
Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
Videogame (1993). LucasArts. Designed by Tim Schafer, David Grossman. Platforms: DOS (1993); Mac (1996). / Day of the Tentacle is a graphical Adventure game, a loose sequel to Maniac Mansion (1987). Widely considered to be one of the best of LucasArts' Adventures, it focuses on Purple Tentacle, an intelligent ambulatory member ...
Miller, Sam J
(1979- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Haunting Your House" in The Red Volume: An Anthology of Stories by the Awkward Robots (anth 2008 ebook) edited by The Awkward Robots, most of his early work being fantasy or horror, though his first novel, the Young Adult The Art of Starving (2017), Equipoisally offers hints as well of an sf explanation for the ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...