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Sunday 20 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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Moran, Jodi

(1964- ) US author, sister of Daniel Keys Moran, with whom she collaborated on one novel, Terminal Freedom (1997). [JC]

(1916-1986) US author and ex-lieutenant colonel in the US Army, known mainly for such well-written thrillers as The Brass Cupcake (1950) and the twenty-one Travis McGee novels (1964-1985), which quickly evolved from seemingly escapist tales of derring-do, with strong hints of Ecological despair about the fate of Florida, into impassioned and savagely explicit laments for that state, for the planet, and for the human race; the nonfiction ...

Volney, M

(1757-1820) French philosopher, traveller and author; he adopted the name Volney, a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney (a French commune), which became his title. After initial travels to the Middle East, and the publication of books describing his responses, he deepened his contemplation of the world in Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791; trans anon as ...

Role Playing Game

Term used to describe a type of game characterized by Lawrence Schick in Heroic Worlds (1991) as a form of "quantified interactive storytelling". Here "quantified" refers to the fact that numerical rules are employed to simulate the fictional world depicted in the game, "interactive" to the players' use of created personas appropriate to that world to act within it, and "storytelling" to the way in which those players use the game to create a shared narrative. The term itself ...

Split Second

Film (1991). Challenge. Directed by Tony Maylam, Ian Sharp. Written by Gary Scott Thompson. Cast includes Alun Armstrong, Kim Cattrall, Neil Duncan, Ian Dury, Rutger Hauer, Michael J Pollard and Pete Postlethwaite. 91 minutes. Colour. / London, 2008 CE. The Thames has risen and society is crumbling. Coffee-drinking hard man Hauer and comics-reading Scots intellectual Duncan are brawling buddy cops on the trail of a heart-eating villain who carves ...

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 ...