SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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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Galactic Civilizations
Videogame (2003). Stardock. Designed by Bradley Wardell. Platforms: Win. / Galactic Civilizations is a descendant of Master of Orion (1993), a turn-based 4X Game played on a two-dimensional galactic map. Its design is based on that of an earlier and less well known version, Galactic Civilizations (1994 Stardock, OS2) designed by Bradley Wardell. As in ...
Quake
Videogame (1996). id Software (id). Designed by John Carmack, American McGee, Sandy Peterson, John Romero, Tim Willits. Platforms: DOS, Lin (1996); rev vt VQuake (1996); rev vt QuakeWorld (1996); Mac, Saturn, Mainframe (1997); rev vt GLQuake (1997); rev vt WinQuake (1997); Amiga, N64 (1998); PPC (2002); rev vt Quake Mobile WinPhone ...
Hall, Desmond W
(1911-1992) Australian-born New Zealand author and editor, in US from early adulthood; he served as assistant editor of Astounding Stories of Super Science (see Astounding Science-Fiction) under Harry Bates 1930-1933, also collaborating with Bates as a writer under the pseudonyms H G Winter and, more famously, Anthony Gilmore; as Gilmore they produced the popular Hawk Carse series, which ...
Johnson, Toby
Working name of US author Edwin Clark Johnson (1945- ), whose Plague: A Novel About Healing (1987) is a Near Future medical thriller, and whose Secret Matter (1990; rev 2005) is a First Contact novel set in San Francisco after a devastating earthquake, the encounter leading to a clement gay Utopia. [JC]
Mason, Daniel
(1976- ) US doctor and author who remains best known for his first novel, The Piano Tuner (2002), an ostensibly nonfantastic tale which follows the eponymous expert into the heart of 1886 Burma, where a chthonic myth-fomenting physician's piano must be tuned in order for him to bring harmony to conflicting factions. Analogies with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902) have been noted. Several of the ...
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 ...