SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 27 May 2022
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 23 May 2022
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Greeno, Gayle
(1949- ) US author of two connected series of Planetary Romances: the Ghatti's Tale sequence beginning with The Ghatti's Tale: Book One: Finders-Seekers (1993) and the Ghatten's Gambit sequence ending with The Farthest Seeking (2000). On the abandoned colony planet of Methuen, various categories of being – including the unsurprisingly cat-like Ghatti, who are Telepaths – intermix, bonding or not. Mind Snare (1997) is a Young Adult tale, as are in effect the ...
Dunyach, Jean-Claude
(1957- ) French mathematician, aeronautical engineer and author, active from the early 1980s, his short stories being published in several volumes, beginning with Autoportrait ["Self-Portrait"] (coll 1986). Two volumes of translated tales have appeared. The Night Orchid: Conan Doyle in Toulouse (coll trans various 2004) may be initially most remarkable for its range, from Hard SF to Fabulations, but a lucid intensity of rendering marks most of his work, including ...
Beyond Westworld
US tv series (1980). MGM Television for the CBS-TV network. Created by Michael Crichton and Lou Shaw. Produced by John Meredith Lucas and Fred Freiberger. Directors include Ted Post, Paul Stanley, and Don Weis. Writers include David Carren, Howard Dimsdale, and Martin Roth. Cast includes Severn Darden, Nancy Harewood, William Jordan, Jim McMullen, Connie Sellecca and James Wainwright. Five 60-minute episodes, the last two instalments unaired. Colour. / In this follow-up to Crichton's film ...
Wilkins, John
(1614-1672) UK philosopher who served as the Bishop of Chester. He wrote no fiction, but was one of the first popularizers of science and a propagandist for scientific progress whose speculative nonfiction is remarkable. The nonfiction The Discovery of a New World; Or, a Discourse Tending to Prove, That 'tis Probable There May be Another Habitable World in the Moone (1638), which seems to reflect a reading of Johannes Kepler's Somnium ["The Dream"] (1630), like that book suggests an Ecology for ...
Midwinter
Videogame (1989). Maelstrom Games (MG). Designed by Mike Singleton. Platforms: AtariST (1989); Amiga, DOS (1990). / Midwinter is an unusual combination of real time Computer Role Playing Game and Computer Wargame, set on an isolated island in the aftermath of a devastating meteorite strike which has plunged Near Future Earth into a world wide winter (see Disaster). The design echoes that of Singleton's previous work, the Heroic Fantasy Lords of Midnight (1984) (see Computer Wargames), and ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...