SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Mindwheel
Videogame (1984). Synapse Software. Designed by Robert Pinsky. Platforms: Atari8, C64, DOS (1984); AtariST (1985). / Written by the noted American poet Robert Pinsky, Mindwheel was originally marketed as an "Electronic Novel". In design terms, however, it is a text-based Adventure game, in which the player takes the role of a "Mind Adventurer". The premise is that the Adventurer's future society is on ...
Westfahl, Gary
(1951- ) American academic and critic. After receiving a PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University in 1986, he worked until 2011 at the University of California, Riverside, then taught at the University at La Verne before retiring in 2017 and receiving the title of professor emeritus. His first major project was a series of contentious articles in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, based on ...
Electric Wine
US Online Magazine published by Diana L Sharples and James E M Rasmussen of Marietta, Georgia. It ran for twelve bimonthly issues between November 1999 (it actually went live on Hallowe'en) and October 2001. It is one of a number of low-paying quasi-Semiprozines that experimented with online publication in the late 1990s and of which virtually nothing now survives bar a few scattered fragments in various archives. It ran both ...
Jordan, Tim
(? - ) UK author, currently in US, whose Cyberpunk Space Opera Glow sequence, beginning with Glow (2021), confronts its protagonist in particular and Homo sapiens in general with a savage dilemma: either he (and the rest of us) beat a savage planetary addiction to an Identity-stealing Drug known as Glow, or ...
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 ...