SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 1 April 2023
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.
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Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
Rifts
Role Playing Game (1990). Palladium Books (PB). Designed by Kevin Siembieda. / Rifts is less a game of Science and Sorcery than it is one of Superscience and Supersorcery. The game's milieu is derived from a somewhat unlikely Future History, which begins with the destruction of a twenty-first-century scientific utopia by a devastating nuclear war. The psychic ...
Ronco, Dan
(? - ) US author in whose PeaceMaker sequence – comprising PeaceMaker (2004) and Unholy Domain (2008) – a self-aware Computer virus (see AI) threatens the world's Communication systems, leaving civilization vulnerable to the specious Uplift conspiracy, the Domain, which hopes unilaterally to ...
Givins, Robert C
(1845-1915) Canadian-born real estate developer (including a castle for himself in South Chicago) and author, in US from an early age; his romances were sometimes published as by Snivig C Trebor (his name spelled backwards). His one sf novel, A Thousand Miles an Hour (1913), might stand as a compendium of misunderstood science – examples being the concept of an aeroplane whose vertical screw allows it to remain still while the world turns, and the notion that ...
Winch, E
(1895-1939) UK author of The Mountain of Gold (1928), a Lost Race tale set in South America, where Incan remains lead deep into the mountains, where a "primitive" Indian "tribe", which has established a Utopian society, is condescendingly discovered. [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 ...