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Thursday 13 August 2026
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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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Panofsky, Margaret
(? - ) US musician, specializing in the viola de gamba, and author; her first novel, The Last Shade Tree (2017), depicts with some complexity a Near Future planet manifestly at the verge of plunging into World War Three through the Young Adult eyes of a disaffected member of the Cherokee nation. His experience of the world, and what may be ...
Gladiatorerna
Film (1968; vt The Peace Game; vt The Gladiators). Sandrews/New Line. Directed by Peter Watkins. Written by Nicholas Gosling and Watkins. Cast includes Frederick Danner, Björn Franzen, Kenneth Lo and Arthur Pentelow. 105 minutes, cut to 91 minutes. Colour. / Watkins uses his customary cinema-verité approach in this Swedish-made film about a Near Future in which, as a surrogate for full-scale ...
Wells, Catherine
Working name of US author Catherine Jean Wells Dimenstein (1952- ) who began publishing sf with the tightly-woven Coconino sequence – comprising The Earth Is All That Lasts (1991), Children of the Earth (1992) and The Earth Saver (1993) – set aeons hence in a Ruined Earth devastated by Climate Change and other ...
Starcraft
Videogame (1998). Blizzard Entertainment (BE). Designed by James Phinney, Chris Metzen. Platforms: Win (1998); Mac (1999); vt Starcraft 64, N64 (2000). / Starcraft is a Real Time Strategy game, played in a two-dimensional overhead view. Its setting owes much to the films Aliens (1986) and Predator (1987). ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...