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Sunday 22 June 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.
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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. ...
Master of Orion
Videogame (1993). Simtex. Designed by Steve Barcia. Platforms: DOS (1993); Mac (1995). / Master of Orion is a turn-based 4X Game, played on a two-dimensional galactic map. Its gameplay is a development of that seen in such earlier games as Reach for the Stars (1983). The central conceit is that a number of species are simultaneously beginning to expand into ...
Edmonds, Gill
(? - ) UK teacher and author whose first novel, The Common (1984), is a Dystopian vision of a Near-Future London where the texture of life has been brutalized by Overpopulation; the common of the title – South London Commons – becomes a haunt of feral children. The Silkie (1986) is fantasy ...
Sliders
US tv series (1995-2000). Created by Traci Tormé and Robert K Weiss for Fox and The Sci Fi Channel. Producers include Tormé, Weiss, Chris Black, and Paul Cajero. Directors include Richard Compton, David E Peckinpah, Jerry O'Connell, and Reza Badiyi. Writers include Tormé, Weiss, Scott Smith Miller, and Tony Blake. Cast includes Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory (seasons 1-4), Sabrina Lloyd as Wade Welles (seasons 1-3), John Rhys-Davies as Professor Maximilian Arturo ...
Gibson, Michael Ferris
(? - ) US author of the Babylon Twins Young Adult sequence beginning with Babylon Twins (2019) as M F Gibson, set in a Near Future Dystopian Earth run by AIs; the young protagonist and her Clones, immune to mind control, rebel(s). [JC]
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 ...