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Sunday 22 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Tales of Magic and Mystery
US Pulp magazine published by Personal Arts Company, Camden, New Jersey and edited by Walter B Gibson. It ran for five issues, December 1927 to April 1928. A weird fiction/occult magazine published partly to take advantage of Gibson's connections in the world of stage magic and particularly with Howard Thurston (1869-1936), for whom Gibson ghost-wrote several so-called true experiences starting with "The Miracle Man of Benares" ...
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Videogame (1988). Lucasfilm Games. Designed by David Fox. Platforms: Amiga, AppleII, AtariST, C64, DOS. / Zak McKracken is a graphical Adventure game with an interface similar to that of Maniac Mansion (1987). The player alternates between the roles of the titular Zak (a reporter for an American supermarket tabloid, the National Inquisitor), Zak's love interest, and her ...
Strieber, Whitley
(1945- ) US author, much better known for horror novels – like The Wolfen (1978) (see Horror in SF; Werewolves) and the Hunger sequence beginning with The Hunger (1981) (see Vampires) – than for his sf, though he has continued to produce the latter intermittently throughout his career, with an emphasis on the ...
Alexander, Thea Plym
(1936- ) US author of 2150: "The Macro Love Story" (1971 as by Don and Thea Plym; exp vt 2150 A.D. as by Thea Alexander 1976), in which a pacific vegetarian Utopia is promulgated on the lines also laid down in the original authors' A Macro Philosophy for the Aquarian Age (1971); she was listed as solo author of the similar ...
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 ...