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Sunday 12 July 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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Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
Videogame (2007). GSC Game World (GSC). Platforms: Win. / Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is a First Person Shooter, much influenced by both Arkady and Boris Strugatski's novel Roadside Picnic (1972; trans 1977) and the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker (1979) that was loosely based ...
Greeno, Gayle
(1949- ) US author of two connected series of Planetary Romances: the Ghatti's Tale sequence beginning with The Ghatti's Tale: Book One: Finders-Seekers (1993) and the Ghatten's Gambit sequence ending with The Farthest Seeking (2000). On the abandoned colony planet of Methuen, various categories of being – including the unsurprisingly Cat-like Ghatti, who are ...
Agricola
Pseudonym of UK civil servant and author Charles William Fielding (1863-1941), whose How England Was Saved: History of the Years 1910-1925 (1908) is a lightly fictionalized Future History of Britain, in which agribusinesses replace traditional farmers (a process described in great detail, as might be expected from the pseudonym chosen), and Parliament is not allowed to sit more than four days a week. For his work as Director-General of Food ...
Raman, A Thothathri
(? - ) Indian journalist and author whose sf novel, Hope!: A 26th Century Tale of Commerce and Love (2002), set in a Galactic Empire apparently dominated by Earth, where a rigid Dystopia has banned both commerce and love from the armamentarium of human responses to reality; the protagonists, who hail from a distant colony planet, rebel successfully. [JC]
Cyberspace
An item of sf Terminology introduced by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984). He takes quite an old sf idea, also much discussed by scientists, in imagining a Near-Future era in which the human brain and nervous system (biological) can interface directly with the global Internet (electrical) by jacking neurally implanted electrodes directly into ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...