SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 June 2026
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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Communion
Film (1989). Pheasantry Films in association with Allied Vision, The Picture Property Company. Coproduced by Philippe Mora, Whitley Strieber and Dan Allingham. Directed by Mora. Written by Strieber based on his own book Communion: A True Story (1987). Cast includes Joel Carlson, Lindsay Crouse, Terri Hanauer, Andreas Katsulas, Frances Sternhagen and Christopher Walken. 101 minutes. Colour. / This interesting film which tells of the ...
Kennaway, James
(1928-1968) Scottish publisher, screenwriter and author best known for such works outside the sf field as Tunes of Glory (1956). His borderline sf novel is The Mind Benders (1963), which applies Mainstream tactics to a story about brainwashing and the psychological consequences of overexposure to experimental conditions of Sensory Deprivation. The book was written from his script for ...
Champions
Role Playing Game (1981). Hero Games (HG). Designed by George MacDonald, Steve Peterson. / The first edition of Champions popularized the use of a point-based method for character creation, an idea previously seen in Superhero 2044 (1977) and The Fantasy Trip (1977-1980 Metagaming Concepts) designed by Steve Jackson. All characters begin the game ...
Mitsuse Ryū
Pseudonym of Kimio Iizuka (1928-1999) a Japanese author and founding member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan (SFWJ), much respected as a prose author and sometime poet in his lifetime, but now more likely to be remembered for popular Manga editions of his work, many of which feature human characters overwhelmed by the machinations of vastly superior intellects and technologies. With an interest in sf inspired by reading the ...
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 ...