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Wednesday 18 February 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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Koster, Raph
(1971- ) US Game designer who has primarily worked on persistent Online Worlds. Koster's first major contributions were made to the free-to-play Heroic Fantasy Multi User Dungeon LegendMUD (1994 Mainframe, Net), of which he was one of the designers. He was later hired as lead designer for Ultima Online (1997), ...
Serpent's Egg, The
Film (1977). Known in Germany as Das Schlangenei. Dino De Laurentiis Corporation/Rialto Film/Bavaria Film. Directed and written by Ingmar Bergman. Cast includes Heinz Bennent, David Carradine, Gert Fröbe, Liv Ullmann and James Whitmore. 119 minutes. Colour. / Ingmar Bergman's thirty-eighth film as director has generally been understood as a failed attempt to give an intimate portrait of Weimar Berlin in 1923, a place and a period he did not know and was unlikely to ...
Dreyer, Hans P
(1886-1945) Norwegian-born author, in US from the early years of the century; his sf novel, The Secret of the Sphinx (1929), is a Lost Race tale set in the Himalayas, to which am impecunious young doctor travels, leaving his wife behind. Her adventures, which include defending herself from a sexual abuser, may seem more fraught. [JC]
Tarzan, Deloris Lehman
Pseudonym of US art critic and author Deloris Tarzan Ament (1934- ), active from around 1970 in Seattle, Washington; she also writes as by Winifred Concannon. Her sf novel Red Tide (1975) with D D Chapman, which is initially set in a research station Under the Sea, describes the disastrous Ecological consequences of sudden anomalies in the growth of the eponymous ...
Hacker, Marilyn
(1942- ) US poet, critic, editor, translator and now-retired Professor of English at the City University of New York, married to Samuel R Delany 1961-1980; the latter's Babel-17 (1966; rev 1969) includes chapter epigraphs taken from her poems. Active since 1961 – her first collection of intensely this-worldly poems, Presentation Piece (coll 1974), won a National Book Award for that year – ...
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 ...