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Friday 17 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Mercenary
Videogame (1985). Novagen Software (NS). Designed by Paul Woakes. Platforms: Atari8, C64 (1985); Amstrad, Spectrum (1987); Amiga, AtariST (1988). / While it is of primarily historical interest today, Mercenary is notable as an early example of a modular plot structure (see Interactive Narrative) in which the player has considerable freedom of action within clearly defined boundaries, ...
Another World
Videogame (1991; vt Out of This World; vt Outer World). Delphine Software. Designed by Éric Chahi. Platforms: Amiga, AtariST (1991); AppleII, DOS, MegaDrive, SNES (1992); Mac (1993); 3DO, Win (1994); Phone (2005); rev Win (2006). / Another World is a platform game (see Videogames) set on an alien planet, much influenced by cinematic conventions and visual ...
Lostetter, Marina J
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Rats Will Run" in Mirror Shards: Volume Two (anth 2012) edited by Thomas K Carpenter; the tale is included in Lifeboats: Three Short Stories of Space Travel and Epic Discovery (coll 2017 ebook). She came to wide attention with the Noumenon sequence beginning with Noumenon (2017), which begins on Earth in the moderately distant- ...
Physics
In discussing the scientific content of sf it is customary to regard the sciences as ranging from "hard" to "soft", with physics lying at the hard end of the spectrum (see Hard SF). A concern with the hard sciences is generally held to have characterized sf of the period 1940-1960, or a type of sf whose locus classicus is to be found in that period, and so we may expect this type of sf, in its scientific aspect, to be dominated by physics. In fact a large part ...
Grove, Peter J
(? - ) UK author of an unremarkable sf adventure for Robert Hale Limited, The Levellers (1981) [JC]
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...