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Friday 27 May 2022
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 23 May 2022
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Worlds of Ultima
Videogame series (from 1990). Origin Systems (OS). / The Worlds of Ultima series was launched as a spinoff from the Ultima sequence of Sword and Sorcery Computer Role Playing Games. The central conceit of Ultima is that the player is represented by the Avatar, an individual from our own world who enters the fantasy land of Britannia through a "dimensional portal", returning at intervals of many years to intervene at crucial points in that world's history. In Worlds of Ultima, the Avatar is ...
Allhoff, Fred
Working name of Charles Frederick Allhoff (1904-1988), US journalist and author known in the sf field for Lightning in the Night (31 August-16 November 1940 Liberty; 1979), a Future War tale which, when serialized, caused considerable stir because of its defence of the arguments of General Billy Mitchell (1879-1936) about the primacy of air power in any future conflict; for its portrayal of a semi-defeated USA in 1945 as she recoups her moral and physical forces and begins to thrust back the ...
Gorodischer, Angélica
(1928-2022) Argentinian author of nonfiction and fiction works in both the realist and the fantastic modes, who was nevertheless very much identified as a science fiction writer. Gorodischer was also closely associated with the city of Rosario, home of her well-known character Trafalgar Medrano, introduced in her novel Trafalgar (1979; trans Amalia Gladhart 2013); this is constructed as a Club Story sequence in which Medrano, a comical millionaire businessman, serves as both observer and social ...
Nasir, Jamil
(1955- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Darkness Beyond" for Aboriginal Science Fiction (May-June 1988); his first novel, Quasar (1995), establishes a sometimes foggy relationship between lucid dream states and the external Perception (and manipulation) of reality. As usual in tales of this sort, Metaphysics tends to complicate the various quests undergone by protagonists whose worlds have become irreal at the hands (see Paranoia) of ...
Gregory, Jackson
(1882-1943) US author of Westerns, two of which have some sf interest: Daughter of the Sun (1921) as by Quién Sabe is a Lost Race tale set close enough to Mexico for one of Montezuma's secret heirs to cause an erotic ruckus; Ru the Conqueror (1933) is Prehistoric SF, also mildly erotized. [JC]
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...