SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 February 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.
Site updated on 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Stewart, Jean
(1953- ) US author of the Women of Isis sf sequence, beginning with Return to Isis (1992) and ending (in mid-narrative) with Return to Isis (1992). The sequence, set in a Ruined Earth venue in a manner that evokes the Planetary Romance, is a forcefully articulated presentation of a world in which a lesbian state (see Gender; ...
Allen, Arthur Bruce
(1903-1975) UK author whose The Pyromaniac (1938) uninterestingly features the use of a heat-operated Ray Gun. [JC]
Moers, Walter
(1957- ) German comics writer/illustrator and author, most of whose early work was in Comics, of greatest sf interest being the Adolf, die Nazisau ["Adolf, the Nazi Pig"] sequence, comprising Adolf (graph 1998) and Adolf, Teil 2 ["Adolf, Part 2"] (graph 1999), a Satirical Alternate History tale in which Hitler ...
Computer Wargame
Term used by this encyclopedia to describe a form of Videogame descended (sometimes quite remotely) from the Wargame. The subject of the Computer Wargame is War, but (unlike First Person Shooters) success does not depend on reaction speed and manual dexterity. Instead, the gameplay is focused on intellectual contests of strategy and tactics; real time variants typically ...
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 ...