SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 12 August 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.
Site updated on 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
Videogame (1992; vt Dune II: Battle for Arrakis Europe). Westwood Studios (WS). Designed by Joseph Bostic, Aaron Powell. Platforms: DOS (1992); Amiga (1993); MegaDrive (1994). / While it was not the first Computer Wargame to run in real time, Dune II was the first Real Time Strategy game as the form is understood today. Although the game was ...
Jung Inwoo
South Korean electronic musician, artist and filmmaker, who also records under the names Wellsgoodness and Sal Sal. The short film Wunderkammer 10.0 (2022), made in collaboration with artists Soyun Park and Yelim Ki, was created using AI tools and digital scanning technology to create a guide to a City of the future by the titular operating system, which starts to achieve self-awareness as an AI ...
Bowman, W E
(1911-1985) UK draughtsman, civil engineer and author whose best-known work is The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), a Parody of British mountaineering expedition reports which quickly gained a cult following. An utterly inept team led by the pompous, Pooteresque "Binder" (his codename in walkie-talkie communications), and including an easily distracted Scientist, ascends or rather fails to ascend the titular mountain. The ...
Last Starfighter, The
Film (1984). Lorimar/Universal. Directed by Nick Castle. Written by Jonathan Betuel. Cast includes Lance Guest, Dan O'Herlihy, Robert Preston, Norman Snow and Catherine Mary Stewart. 101 minutes. Colour. / In this cheerful, derivative wish-fulfilment story, Alex (Guest), who lives in a trailer park, is a teenage whiz at computer arcade games. Attaining the highest-ever score on the Starfighter game, he is conscripted (though at first refusing) by its inventor, an alien ...
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 ...