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Sunday 13 July 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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Perry, Elaine
(1959- ) US author of a Near Future sf novel, Another Present Era (1990), set in an Entropic New York just as the lights go out, leaving the female protagonist alone (see Horror in SF) in an abandoned skyscraper as the rising waters, generated by global warming (see Climate Change), begin to engulf her ...
Stamey, Sara
(1953- ) US author in whose Wild Card Run sequence of sf adventures – Wild Card Run (1987), Win, Lose, Draw (1988) and Double Blind (1990) – a refreshingly tangential attitude towards plotting keeps a young female protagonist with Psi Powers hopscotching from planet to planet. En route she embraces her own tangled family romance on one world, and elsewhere confronts some ...
Fiyah
US semiprofessional quarterly Online Magazine, subtitled "Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction" and also available as an ebook; published by the Niggerati Space Station, a virtual community of writers established by Troy L Wiggins. / Fiyah began in January (Winter) 2017 and is devoted to stories "by and about the Black People of the African diaspora". It was founded by Phenderson Djèlí Clark and ...
Irwin, Robert
(1946-2024) UK academic, mediaevalist, professional juggler (briefly) and author whose work in Arabian studies, of importance in itself, underpins the world envisioned in his first and most famous novel, The Arabian Nightmare (1983; rev 1987), which may be the definitive rendering of its central conceit: a mise en abyme-like dream narrative whose protagonist, upon seeming to awaken, only finds himself passing out of one story through a Portal into a deeper dream [for ...
Star Wars [franchise]
At the heart of this now very substantial enterprise is the Cinema sequence whose first instalment was Star Wars (1977). To the end of 2017, there have been nine Star Wars films. In 1997, before the release of the second, "prequel" trilogy, George Lucas re-released the original films into cinemas with updated special effects and minor story changes as "Special Editions". These changes were ...
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 ...