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Thursday 13 November 2025
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Holocaust
1. A blanket item of Terminology used in this encyclopedia for the fictionally popular variety of catastrophe which is directly caused by human or occasionally Alien action, intentional or otherwise. Natural calamities are dealt with under Disaster, as are cases where a technically human-instigated cataclysm has effects similar to a natural one. For example, human interference with the ...
Alternity
Role Playing Game (1998). Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Designed by Bill Slavicsek, Richard Baker. / Alternity was an attempt to create a generic system for role playing in science fiction milieux. It had limited success commercially, though much of the background material was reused in d20 Modern (2002) (see d20). The Alternity core rules are not linked to any specific setting; instead, ...
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Free, Colin
(1925-1996) Australian author whose The Soft Kill (1973), set in a totalitarian Near Future world in the depths of an Overpopulation crisis (an emphasis which clearly dates Free's concerns, as later in the twentieth century overpopulation became an issue more often ignored than confronted); the privileged few live in elevated Keeps. [JC]
World of Horror
UK letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine, printed on middle-grade paper. Published by Dalruth Publishing Group, then Gresham Publishing. Editor: Gent Shaw. Ten bimonthly issues, 1974 to 1975. / Subtitled "An Anthology of the Macabre from Film and Fiction", this magazine differed from most such contemporary titles published in either the UK or US in that it featured considerable internal colour material, then uncommon. It also ran ...
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 ...