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Wednesday 30 April 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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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Gale, Floyd C
(1918-1997) Working name of Floyd C Gold, US critic and author, the brother of H L Gold. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Treachery on Planetoid 41" for Amazing in June 1940, a tale of two astronauts shipwrecked on an Asteroid with insufficient supplies to support both before rescue. He began writing the "Galaxy's Five Star Shelf" book review column in Galaxy for ...
Postal Worlds
Games such as Chess have been played by post since at least 1824, when the members of the newly formed Edinburgh Chess Club challenged their London counterparts to a correspondence match, and probably much earlier. These games, however, were played in alternating turns between individual participants, each of whom had a board displaying the current state of play. The concept of a game in which several players submit their orders for a turn to ...
Bosse, Malcolm
(1926-2002) US author of novels for adult and Young Adult readerships, best known for The Warlord (1983) which, like most of his work, is an historical fiction. Of genre interest are Cave Beyond Time (1980), whose orphaned, 15-year-old protagonist Time Travels from an Arizona archaeological dig to three different ancient eras, where he undergoes rites of passage into acceptance of his maturing self; and ...
Zimmer, Paul Edwin
(1943-1997) US author, brother of Marion Zimmer Bradley, with whom he wrote his first sf, the Survivors sequence comprising Hunters of the Red Moon (1973) [unacknowledged until 1992 printing], whose protagonist is abducted by Aliens to serve as gladiatorial prey on a game planet (see Games and Sports), and The Survivors (1979), a somewhat congested ...
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 ...