SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 20 June 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
System Shock
Videogame (1994). Looking Glass Studios (LG). Designed by Doug Church. Platforms: DOS (1994); Mac (1995). / System Shock is an early First Person Shooter much influenced by Computer Role Playing Games. It is set in a Cyberpunk world, with gameplay which combines puzzle solution, exploration and combat. ...
Barth, John
(1930-2024) US academic and author, one of the central fabulists (see Fabulation) of his generation of writers, noted for a sometimes relentless experimentalism, an inability or disinclination to seize upon the moment of story he famously articulated in "The Literature of Exhaustion" (August 1967 The Atlantic), where postmodern (see Postmodernism and SF) writers are presented as miming the genuine stories before ...
Proto SF
Meaningful use of the term "proto science fiction" obviously depends on one's Definition of the term Science Fiction, just as the use of the term "taproot texts" [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] depends on a moderately stable definition of the term "fantasy"; indeed, the quest for sf's literary ancestry and "origins" is as much a dimension of ...
Board Game
Term used to describe games played with physical pieces on a (generally flat) board or map, as with Chess. Clearly this definition can overlap with that of Wargames; this encyclopedia has categorized games descended from the board and counter Wargame Tactics (1954) designed by Charles Roberts and sharing its preoccupation with realistic simulation as Wargames, and all ...
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 ...