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Thursday 21 May 2026
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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Adlard, Mark
Working name used by UK author Peter Marcus Adlard (1932- ) for all his books. Until his retirement in 1976 he was a manager in the steel industry, and his knowledge of managerial and industrial problems plays a prominent role in his Tcity trilogy: Interface (1971), Volteface (1972) and Multiface (1975). The series is set in a city of the Near Future. By calling it Tcity, Adlard plainly ...
Palencar, John Jude
(1957- ) American artist. After receiving a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, he received further training at the Illustrators Workshop in Paris before embarking upon a highly successful career of painting book covers. He is noted for an intense, almost photographic realism with bold colours, though his figures are sometimes juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds. Primarily working in the fields of Fantasy and ...
Starcross
Videogame (1982). Infocom. Designed by Dave Lebling. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, DOS, PCBoot (1982); C64 (1983); Mac (1984); AtariST (1985); Amiga (1986). / Starcross was one of the first text-based Adventure games to use an sf theme. The game's story is Hard SF, reminiscent of Arthur C Clarke's ...
Jael
(1937-2020) Working name of an American artist who was persistently coy about her full name; however, since it is known that her mother was named Muriel Ashton, and since records show that a Jael Ashton graduated in 1956 from West High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, the state where she grew up, it is reasonable to conclude that Jael Ashton was her original name. After an earlier marriage, she was married to Greg Ruesch until her death. Her activities in the years following high school are ...
Britton, David
(1945-2020) UK publisher and author, founder with Michael Butterworth (and briefly Charles Partington) of Savoy Books in 1976 in Manchester, whose early list included works by Michael Moorcock, Charles Platt and Jack Trevor Story. With Butterworth, he edited The Savoy Book (anth 1978) and ...
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 ...