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Tuesday 18 January 2022
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.
Site updated on 17 January 2022
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Muller, John E
A House Name used on many sf and supernatural novels published by Badger Books. The great majority of these were the work of R L Fanthorpe (31 titles), with several more by John S Glasby and one by A A Glynn [for details see Checklist]. [JC/SH/DRL]
England Invaded
Film (1909). Warwick Trading Company. Directed and written by Leo Stormont. Story may have been based without credit on Guy du Maurier's An Englishman's Home (performed 27 January 1909; 1909 chap). Cast not given. 10 minutes. Black and white. / Like The Airship Destroyer (1909) directed by Walter R Booth earlier the same year, England Invaded is a very early sf movie and also an early visual presentation of the Future War Invasion story in which England is threatened from somewhere in the ...
Hird, James Dennis
(1850-1920) UK author involved in nineteenth-century temperance movements and Christian socialism: he was Warden of Ruskin College in Oxford – a working-class college located in Oxford to underline some obvious points about the class-structure of British education – from its founding in 1899 until 1909. Toddle Island; Being the Diary of Lord Bottsford (1894) as by Lord Bottsford, is an Erewhonian Utopia set on an Island in the Pacific, and effectively satirizes much of UK ...
Barker, M A R
Working name of Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, born Phillip Barker (1929-2012), US academic specializing in linguistics, game designer and author. His best-known genre creation is the enormously detailed Science Fantasy world of Tékumel (which see), the setting of his early Role Playing Game Empire of the Petal Throne (1975); further related RPGs followed. / Of Barker's five Tékumel novels, The Man of Gold (1984) – a Bildungsroman full of political intrigue and ...
Game-Worlds
Although this term may be applied to imaginary worlds governed by the rules of ancient games like Chess, this encyclopedia chiefly applies it to worlds designed by the manufacturers of Games – almost always Role Playing Games (or Gamebooks) or computer Adventure games (see Videogame). In the case of RPGs the parameters of the "world" (the fictional setting in which the game takes place) will be set out in the handbooks which form the central part of the game package; in the latter, much ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...