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Thursday 24 April 2025
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.
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Stalking the Night Fantastic
Role Playing Game (1983). Tri Tac Games. Designed by Richard Tucholka, Chris Belting. / While it is often reminiscent of the similarly titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975), Stalking the Night Fantastic takes a far more light-hearted approach to its investigations of the alien and the extraordinary. Players adopt the roles of agents of "Bureau 13", a secret branch of the ...
Cooper, James Fenimore
(1789-1851) US author, best known for the Leather-Stocking Tales sequence in a gentlemanly frontier-adventure tale style, a set of essentially nonfantastic proto-Westerns which includes The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and many other widely read novels featuring the woodsman Natty Bumppo; he also wrote several Gothic tales containing supernatural elements, like the broad hints that the protagonist of The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground ...
Urban Legends
Modern oral folklore – also spread via newspapers, photocopier graffiti and, now predominantly, the Internet (see Creepypasta). An urban legend is typically a Tall Tale [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] with a frisson of deserved comeuppance or Horror, very often related as having actually happened to a "friend of a friend" – a ...
Movie Club
US letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine. Publisher: Movie Club Incorporated. Editors: Don Dohler and Don Leifert. ?12 issues published on an erratic schedule, 1993 to 1997. / Though other genres were covered, much of Movie Club's content was devoted to Horror and sf films including The Black Scorpion (1957), The ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...