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Tuesday 17 February 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Hunger Games, The: Catching Fire
Film (2013). Lionsgate/Color Force. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Written by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on a novel by Suzanne Collins. Cast includes Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Jennifer Lawrence and Donald Sutherland. 146 minutes. Colour. / Francis Lawrence replaced Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games (2012), for the second adaptation of Collins's hugely popular series; ...
Stellar Conquest
Board and counter Wargame (1974). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Howard Thompson. / Stellar Conquest is perhaps the earliest precursor of the 4X Videogame form (see 4X Games); it inspired Reach for the Stars (1983), which was a major influence on such later games as Master of Orion (1993). Players take ...
Smith, Ali
(1962- ) Scottish author, active from the early 1980s, prominent from the beginning of the twenty-first century for incisive world-facing though non-fantastic novels, beginning with Hotel World (2001). There But For The (2011) surreally recounts the effects of a dinner guest's refusal to leave the room where he has locked himself in: echoes of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street" ...
Edelman, Scott
(1955- ) US editor and author, his fiction having had perhaps unduly little recognition, almost certainly because his work shifts from horror to fantasy to sf without any marketing consistency; his first work of genre interest was "Guinea Pigs" in Fantasy Book for May 1983. The stories assembled in Suicide Art (coll 1992 chap) are horror, though some tales in These Worlds Are Haunted (coll 2001) are sf; various ...
Guasch, Pol
Working name of Spanish/Catalan author Pol Guasch i Arcas (1997- ), whose first novel, Napalm al cor (2021; trans Mara Faye Lethem as Napalm in the Heart 2024), is set Equipoisally in either or both an indeterminately Near Future Nomansland or the remains of an earthly City that might have once ...
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 ...