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Friday 5 December 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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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Gateway Game
A gateway game is a term used in board, card and tabletop gaming (see Board Games; Card Games; Role Playing Games) to denote a Game that is easy to play and understand, and which is suitable for a player who may not be familiar with the above genres or a specific subgenre. Semiotically, the term implies that these games open the gates for novice players and allow them ...
Winterson, Jeanette
(1959- ) UK author, much of whose work juggles elements out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize deeply held arguments about Gender (see also Feminism); as her work edges constantly into the allegorical it is, however, not easy to think of her as a natural author of the fantastic, though her work is too various and transgressive for her to be categorized as a ...
Weiss, Jiri
(1913-2004) Austro-Hungarian [ie Czech] film director and author, active as a maker of documentaries in 1930s Czechoslovakia, in the UK during World War Two where he made propaganda films, active as a director in France from 1947, in USA from 1969. He is of sf interest for The Lost Government; Or, Do You Really Like It?: A Fairy Play for Grown-Ups (1945), a Near Future Satire set just after the end of ...
Pressfield, Steven
(1943- ) Trinidad-born screenwriter and author, in US from early childhood; of his several screenplays, those filmed include King Kong Lives (1986) directed by John Guillermin, a Monster film; and Freejack (1992), which is sf. His first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life (1995), which was unsuccessfully filmed as ...
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 ...