SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 10 December 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 9 December 2022
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Circuit's Edge
Videogame (1990). Westwood Associates. Designed by George Alec Effinger, Michael Legg, Michael Moore. Platforms: DOS. / Circuit's Edge was scripted by George Alec Effinger, and is set in his Budayeen milieu – a twenty-first-century slum in a Cyberpunk future dominated by Islam – with a story which takes place between ...
Foer, Jonathan Safran
(1977- ) US author each of whose first two novels revolves around a Foer-like protagonist's confrontation with a central abomination of the current era. Everything Is Illuminated (2002) circles the Holocaust from viewpoints prior to and after the 1942 massacre of the Jews of Trochenbrod in Poland (see Holocaust Fiction). The narrator of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) is a nine-year-old named ...
Widescreen Baroque
An occasionally quoted critical term coined by Brian Aldiss to denote Space Opera at its most grandiose: what might also be termed space grand opera. In his introduction to the 1964 Faber edition (as The Paradox Men) of Charles L Harness's Flight into Yesterday (May 1949 Startling; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men ...
Rameau, Jean
Pseudonym of French author Laurent Labaigt (1858-1942), who first became well-known with the contes cruels assembled in Fantasmagories, histoires rapides ["Phantasmagorias: Rapid Tales"] (coll 1887), which contains some of the best examples of his very large output (reportedly 5,000 short stories in all); though condensed into a kind of surreal pointillism, sf motifs – the use of electricity as a universal Power Source, and portraits ...
Calder, Richard
(1956- ) UK author – in Thailand 1990-1996 and later in the Philippines until returning to London in the first years of this century – who began publishing sf with "Toxine" in Interzone: The 4th Anthology (anth 1989) edited by John Clute, Simon Ounsley and David Pringle; his early short fiction, almost always densely post-Cyberpunk in idiom and ...
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 ...