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Wednesday 19 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 18 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 ...
Welby, Philip
Pseudonym of C D Davis (? - ), UK author of The Pleasure Domes of Sigma 93 (1978), a Space Opera for Robert Hale Limited. [JC]
Gauger, Rick
Working name of US author Richard C Gauger (1942- ), who began publishing sf with "The Vacuum-Packed Picnic" for Omni in September 1979. His sf novel, Charon's Ark (1987), intriguingly depicts the hijacking of a 747 full of students, which is taken to Charon, the hollowed-out moon of Pluto, a Macrostructure constructed by Aliens to preserve Earth's ...
Sunless Sea
Videogame (2014). Failbetter Games. Designed by Alexis Kennedy. Platforms: PC. / Expanding the world first seen in Fallen London (2009), Sunless Sea takes the player away from the smoke of Fallen London in order to sail and explore the mysterious Unterzee that surrounds it. The game is considerably different from the original, changing the genre of the game and expanding the compact, narratively dense world ...
Wyndham, John
That portion of his full name used by UK author John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (?1903-1969) after World War Two, and by far his best-known byline; before World War Two, he had published work as John Beynon Harris, John Beynon, Wyndham Parkes, Lucas Parkes and Johnson Harris. As well as changing names with frequency, and, according to an intensely argued speculation by David Ketterer, obscuring the fact that he was born out of wedlock precisely a year ...
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 ...