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Sunday 20 April 2025
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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Bell, Clare
(1952- ) UK-born author, in the US from 1957; a test-equipment engineer for a computer firm 1978-1990. She began publishing sf with Ratha's Creature (1983) – the first volume of the Ratha sequence of juveniles (also known as The Named), followed by Clan Ground (1984), Ratha and Thistle-Chaser (1990) and Ratha's Challenge (1995) – which delineates the lives of a ...
Gilchrist, Rosetta Luce
(1850-1921) US medical doctor and author of Tibby: A Novel Dealing with Psychic Forces and Telepathy (1904), in which Telepathy is used for Communication with a land beyond which seems to resemble a Utopia. [JC]
Tie
A term used in this encyclopedia to designate a work whose subject matter is tied to a previous work or concept. In some respects, therefore, a tie clearly resembles a sequel. However, ties can be differentiated from sequels in two ways: first, a tie is generally written to occupy a different format or genre than the work which inspires it – novelizations are, for instance, often spun off from films, an example being The Sensitives (1968), Louis ...
Rejuvenation
The restoration of youth or a plausible semblance thereof has always seemed both more practical and more comfortable than the troublingly open-ended perspectives of Immortality. This entry deals chiefly with stories of bodily rejuvenation through Medicine and allied procedures: for the wilder sf tropes of transferring one's mind or brain to a new, young body or of growing inexorably younger by living backwards, see ...
Metroid
Videogame (1986). Nintendo. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, Yoshio Sakamoto. Platforms: NES (1986); GBA (2005); Wii (2007). / Similarly to its contemporary Exile (1988), Metroid is a combination of platform and puzzle game (see Videogames), displayed from the side in two dimensions. As with many examples of the more recent action Adventure ...
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 ...