SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2026
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Timequest
Videogame (1991). Legend Entertainment. Designed by Robert Bates. Platforms: DOS. / TimeQuest is an illustrated text Adventure in which the player, adopting the role of an operative in a future organization of Time Police, must undo the alterations to history made by a rogue agent before they become irreversible. The basic structure of the game is modular (see ...
Berk, Howard
(1925-2016) US screenwriter and author of several books, including the interesting sf novel The Sun Grows Cold (1971), in which a man whose brain has been tampered with and whose previous life may have been disastrous reawakens (see Sleeper Awakes) in a terrifying Ruined Earth, most of whose inhabitants, who seem insane, lurk Underground, though an unpleasant elite occupies ...
Bishop, David
(1966- ) New Zealand-born editor and author now resident in the UK; before 2000 he edited at least two UK Comics: Judge Dredd Megazine and 2000 AD. He has since written Ties for Judge Dredd, Doctor Who and Nikolai Dante [see Checklist below] and scripted adventure storylines for The ...
Decadence
Although the concept of "decadence", meaning the state of decay to which an institution has fallen after a long period of prosperity, can be dated to the early 1500s, the more modern sense, of an entire culture succumbing to an enervating lack of vitality (or an indulgence in sloth or sensual pleasures), began to emerge only in the nineteenth century. The belief that cultures eventually fall into a debilitating (and usually irreversible) sickness owes much to ...
Entropy
In its strict meaning, "entropy" is a thermodynamics term, first used by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) in 1850 to describe the amount of heat that must be put into a closed system to bring it to a given state. The Second Law of Thermodynamics – often stated in terms of work as "it is impossible to produce work by transferring heat from a cold body to a hot body in any self-sustaining process" – can alternatively be rendered: "Entropy always increases in any closed ...
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 ...