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Saturday 23 September 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Videogame (1999). Firaxis Games (FG). Designed by Brian Reynolds, Sid Meier. Platforms: Win (1999); Mac (2000); Lin (2001). / Alpha Centauri is a 4X Game based on an attempt to colonize the eponymous solar system. It is much influenced by the designers' Civilization series of historical games, particularly Sid Meier's Civilization II (1996 ...
Carr, Wallace
Pseudonym of UK author Reginald Aubrey Gibbin (1890-1973), mostly of romances for teenage girls, active from around 1930; he is of some sf interest for The Grotto of Arratsu (1940), whose two young protagonists discover a Lost Race on an unknown Island in the Atlantic Ocean, where great gates in the eponymous Underground grotto once opened the way to Atlantis ...
Spofford, Harriet Prescott
(1835-1921) US author, much of whose work was Fantasy or Supernatural Fiction [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], beginning with her first novel, Sir Rohan's Ghost: A Romance (1860) anonymous. Several tales of interest are assembled as "The Amber Beads" and Other Stories (coll 1989), its title story – "The Amber Beads" (January-February 1860 ...
Hay, William Delisle
(1853-? ) UK author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, in New Zealand for some years, and known for writings on New Zealand matters, including Brighter Britain!; Or, Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand (1882 2vols). His first sf tale, The Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942 (1880 chap), retains interest for the vividness with which it presents three central topoi of the Death-of-the- ...
Skal, David J
(1952- ) US author whose first novel, Scavengers (1980), suggests some sf basis for a plot involving Memory transfer in a corrupt world. His second, When We Were Good (1981), evokes a powerful sense of cultural despair in the tale of a sterile world in which Genetically Engineered hermaphrodites (see Gender) fail to represent an emblem of hope for the ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...