SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 May 2022
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 9 May 2022
Sponsor of the day: Anonymous ($3,000)
Big Eyes, Small Mouth
Role Playing Game (1997). Guardians of Order (GOO). Designed by Mark MacKinnon. / Big Eyes, Small Mouth is a generic system used for playing games inspired by Japanese Anime and Manga, both those based on specific series and those which simply share the form's characteristic themes and enthusiasm for melodrama. The title refers to a heavily stylized approach to depicting human features often used in its source material. The game's mechanics are simple and flexible, designed to be used with ...
Daniel, F E
(1839-1914) US medical doctor, publisher, teacher and author; he served in the American Civil War as a surgeon, and among other positions served as President of the American Congress on Tuberculosis, 1905-1906. Of sf interest is his one novel, The Strange Case of Dr Bruno (1906), which describes the Invention of a Drug capable of putting subjects into Suspended Animation, thus offering them a form of Immortality. [JC]
McGuire, Richard
(1957- ) US comics artist and author whose Graphic Novel Here (graph 2014), which began as a short story in graphic form, "Here" (January 1989 RAW), is of considerable sf interest. The basic structure of the enterprise is non-chronological. Each double-page panel gives a perspectivally invariant view of a single location in north-eastern America, probably semi-rural New Jersey, so that the "tale" is locked in space. Time, however, is fluid: each panel is precisely dated, ...
Vess, Charles
(1951- ) American artist. After receiving a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973, Vess briefly worked in animation before moving to New York City in 1977 to do illustrations for National Lampoon, Heavy Metal, Klutz Press, and other clients. Yet he displayed a natural talent for illustrating works of Fantasy by producing a number of paintings for a 1977 edition of J R R Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) while also writing and illustrating his own fantasy novel, The ...
Thompson, W R
(1955- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Perceptions" in Analog for November 1983, and who has published several Hard SF stories, often in the same magazine, over the past thirty years. His only series are Ties to the Star Trek universe, in the Star: The Next Generation sequence, beginning with Star Trek: The Next Generation: Debtor's Planet (1994). His only independent novel, Sideshow (1988), set in a Near Future America riven by sects, most ...
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 and one Semiprozine Hugo for his self-produced news magazine, Ansible (which see). His one ...