SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Robbins, David
(1950- ) US author, prolific in several genres under various names, his first novel, The Wereling (1983), being horror; perhaps best known for the nonfantastic Wilderness sequence of Westerns as by David Thompson. He is of greatest sf interest for the Endworld Post-Holocaust Survivalist sequence, which begins with ...
Bartlett, Frederick Orin
(1876-1945) US screenwriter and author of several adventure novels; The Web of the Golden Spider (1909) is a Lost Race tale which carries its romantically-involved protagonists from Boston to the Andes, where unguarded Incan treasures are soon discovered. [JC]
Interactive Narrative
The outcome of any given game is inherently uncertain, since it must be possible to win or lose (or, in the case of Toy Games, to play at will). Yet stories, as normally understood, should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and only one of each. Games which include stories – referred to in this encyclopedia as Interactive Narratives – have thus proved difficult to design. There has also been considerable debate as to whether it is desirable, or even ...
Crawford, Chris
(1950- ) US Game designer, important in the early years of commercial Videogame development and subsequently noted for his distaste for the direction taken by the industry. Crawford was an enthusiastic player of board and counter Wargames who went on to design many of the seminal Computer Wargames, including Tanktics (1976) – his ...
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 ...