SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 March 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.
Site updated on 9 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Science Fantasy
In the Terminology of sf readers, and more especially publishers, this term in its usual sense of something distinct or partly distinct from Science Fiction has never been clearly defined, though Joseph M Crawford, James J Donahue and Donald M Grant, in their "333": A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953 chap), attempted without much luck to establish it as an ...
Star Saga
Videogame series (from 1987). MasterPlay. Designed by Andrew Greenberg, Rick Dutton, Walter Freitag, Michael Massimilla. / Star Saga is a series of paragraph-system Board Games, in the manner of Tales of the Arabian Nights (see Board Games), which are distinguished by the use of computer software to perform the necessary housekeeping tasks (an approach resembling that employed ...
Cinefex
US Cinema perfect-bound 8 x 9 in magazine printed on slick paper in similar format to a trade paperback. Published by Don Shay/Cinefex LLC. Editors John Duncan, others. 172 issues 1980-2021. Quarterly. / Cinefex grew largely out of publisher Shay's love for the films and visual effects work of Willis H O'Brien, and over the years it remained a cornerstone magazine for those interested in state-of-the-art cinematic ...
Watts, Peter
(1958- ) Canadian marine biologist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Niche" in Tesseracts3 (anth 1990) edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott; his early short fiction was assembled as Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (coll 2001); Beyond the Rift (coll 2013) mostly assembles more recent stories. He is very much better known, however, for his longer work, in ...
Sternbach, Rick
Working name of American artist Richard Michael Sternbach (1951- ), born in Connecticut. He left the University of Connecticut after three years to begin working as an artist and garnered his first sf assignment in 1973, for the October 1973 issue of Analog, illustrating G Harry Stine's article "A Program for Space Flight" with interior art and a cover depicting two spherical spacecraft near an enormous planet. ...
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 ...