SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 July 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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Galactic Civilizations
Videogame (2003). Stardock. Designed by Bradley Wardell. Platforms: Win. / Galactic Civilizations is a descendant of Master of Orion (1993), a turn-based 4X Game played on a two-dimensional galactic map. Its design is based on that of an earlier and less well known version, Galactic Civilizations (1994 Stardock, OS2) designed by Bradley Wardell. As in ...
Virtual Reality
Since the mid-1980s, a popular item of sf Terminology, and for a century or so – in a rather more extended sense – a popular sf theme. In ordinary usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real (or at least all-encompassing) to the person who "enters" it; one essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it should be able to interact with it. To a degree all Videogames, as ...
Drennan, Kathryn M
(1956- ) US author, married to J Michael Straczynski, with whom she has collaborated on articles; in her own right, she is the author of Babylon 5: Book 9: To Dream in the City of Sorrows (1997), which novelizes episodes from the television show Babylon 5. [JC]
Lynch, Patrick
Joint pseudonym of UK authors Gary Humphreys (? - ) and Philip Sington (1962- ) for a series of Technothrillers including The Annunciation (1993) and Carriers (1995), a medical Technothriller about a hugely menacing Pandemic originating in the tropics. [JC]
Bermúdez, María Elvira
(1916-1988) Mexican editor, academic and author; her fiction, mostly detective novels, is mostly nonfantastic. She is of sf interest (see Women SF Writers) primarily for an influential Anthology, Cuentos Fantásticos Mexicanos ["Mexican Fantastic Tales"] (anth 1986), which presents some of her own work. Contributors with entries in this encyclopedia include Juan José ...
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 ...