SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 February 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.
Site updated on 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Roborally
Board Game (1994). Wizards of the Coast (WotC). Designed by Richard Garfield. / RoboRally is a light hearted game of Robot carnage, reminiscent of the UK television series Robot Wars (1997-2003) or the US BattleBots (2000-2002). The players are bored supercomputers who decide to relieve their ennui by staging a race around a series of checkpoints with ...
Biggles
1. Nickname of airman James Bigglesworth, a character created by W E Johns (whom see) for a lengthy sequence of books and stories published from 1932, beginning with his exploits flying Sopwith Camels in World War One. Biggles's adventures continued through World War Two and well into the post-war era until the author's death in 1968, and after; a final book of uncollected stories appeared ...
Cook, Michele
(? - ) US journalist, screenwriter and author who in collaboration with her husband (since 2013) John Sandford wrote the Near Future Young Adult Singular Menace trilogy opening with Uncaged (2014), in which young animal-rights activists attempt to free experimental animals from a research laboratory and find themselves entangled with ...
Bannister, Andrew
(1965- ) UK author whose Spin trilogy beginning with Creation Machine (2016) is primarily set, at least initially, in the eponymous Macrostructure, a constructed ensemble of something like ninety planets revolving around twenty-one suns (see Stars), a vast complex assembled (and in a sense manufactured) by what may be a Forerunner civilization. The ...
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 ...