SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 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 13 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Moffett, Judith
(1942- ) US academic, poet and author; a professor at the University of Pennsylvania 1979-1994. She was first active as a poet, publishing two collections – Keeping Time (coll 1976) and Whinny Moor Crossing (coll 1984); the full-length study, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (1984), contains an extensive study of Merrill's work of greatest sf interest, ...
Warrick, Patricia S
(1925-2023) US academic, most of whose work has concentrated upon the themes explicated in the book version of her PhD thesis, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980), an impressively thorough study that concentrates on the work of Isaac Asimov, including an analysis of the Encyclopedia Galactica which serves as Hari Seldon's electronic bible in the Foundation series; her analysis is supplemented by ...
Westlake, Michael
(1942- ) UK author and editor, much of whose work has been in film studies. One Zero and the Night Controller (1980) is a Fabulation in which a taxi driver tracks down an occult nocturnal mystery; Imaginary Women (1987) plays with questions of Perception as conveyed through the hallucinations of film; and in 51 Soko: To the Islands on the Other Side of the World (1990) ...
Collectible Card Game
Term used to describe a form of Card Game in which the cards are both collectible in the manner of trading cards (see Collectibles) and usable as a game. Individual cards typically come with their own rules for play, any potential conflicts being resolved by a set of "meta rules" which apply to the game as a whole. Such games are generally sold as starter sets or basic "decks", which contain the core rules and an initial set, or ...
Gilliam, Terry
(1940- ) US-born filmmaker, based in the UK from 1967, a UK citizen from 1968; he renounced his American citizenship in 2006. After editing a college humour magazine he became an editorial assistant and cartoonist for Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) on Help! from 1962 to 1965; after Help! folded he worked as an illustrator and copywriter for an agency in Los Angeles before moving to London to work on a short-lived magazine, The Londoner. On its demise he ...
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 ...