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Monday 2 December 2024
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 2 December 2024
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Predator
Film (1987). Amercent/American Entertainment/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by John McTiernan. Written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas. Cast includes Elpidia Carrillo, Bill Duke, Kevin Peter Hall, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. 106 minutes. Colour. / A special-forces group undertaking a commando-style rescue mission in South America clashes bloodily with guerrillas and then very much more bloodily with the Predator: an intelligent Alien (Hall) that ...
Numan, Gary
(1958- ) UK pop composer and performer. Numan achieved a shortlived but notable commercial success with a series of futuristic songs performed to the accompaniment of electronic synthesizers, very much under the influence of Kraftwerk. Although the youthful angst of this music does sometimes veer into self-melodramatic nonsense, at its best these plangent soaring synth-melodies their pulsing, mechanic beats, and the mournful, slightly nasal ...
Metaltech
Videogame series (from 1994). Dynamix. / After developing the first MechWarrior game in the late 1980s (see Battletech), Dynamix lost the licence to Activision. Their response was to create their own version of the Battletech (1984) universe, featuring HERCULANs (human and AI piloted bipedal robots) in a unique Future History, ...
Bradfield, Scott
(1955- ) US academic, critic and author, a professor at the University of Connecticut 1989-2008. His first sf story, the orthodox "What Makes a Cage? Jamie Knows" in Protostars (anth 1971) ed David Gerrold, significantly fails to prefigure his mature works, some of the best of the latter appearing in The Secret Life of Houses (coll 1988; exp vt Dream of the Wolf 1990; further exp vt ...
Computer Wargame
Term used by this encyclopedia to describe a form of Videogame descended (sometimes quite remotely) from the Wargame. The subject of the Computer Wargame is War, but (unlike First Person Shooters) success does not depend on reaction speed and manual dexterity. Instead, the gameplay is focused on intellectual contests of strategy and tactics; real time variants typically ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...