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Saturday 14 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.
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Outer Worlds, The
Videogame (2019). Obsidian Entertainment. Designed by Leonard Boyarsky, Tim Cain, and Charles Staples. Platforms: PS4, Win, XBoxOne (2019); Switch (2020). / Not to be confused with the same year's release, Outer Wilds, The Outer Worlds is a comic, first-person action Computer Role Playing Game that pits players against a coalition of inept but dastardly ...
Signs
Film (2002). Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company) presents a Blinding Edge Pictures/Kennedy/Marshall production. Directed by M Night Shyamalan. Written by Shyamalan. Cast includes Abigail Breslin, Rory Culkin, Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. 106 minutes. Colour. / Superficially, Signs is an alien Invasion movie, told from the perspective of an American ...
Attack Vector: Tactical
Cardboard models-based Wargame (2004). Ad Astra Games. Designed by Ken Burnside, Eric Finley, Tony Valle. / Attack Vector is a rare example of a game which, like Battlefleet Mars (1977) and Independence War: The Starship Simulator (1997), approaches space combat in a physically realistic way. Newtonian mechanics and accurate analyses of ...
Corbett, Julian
(1854-1922) UK author (in his early career) who later became a naval historian (partly for reasons of social prestige). He is the author of a Lost Race tale, Kophetua the Thirteenth (1889 2vols), which describes the ancient Christian kingdom of Oneiria, a Utopia founded in Africa by an Englishman; notably, this utopia, based on a reform of Money, contains within it a ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...