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Saturday 22 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.
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Walters, Nick
(? - ) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Sad Professor" in Perfect Timing (anth 1998) edited by Helen Fale and Mark Phippen, but who has since concentrated almost exclusively on Ties contributed to the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Dry Pilgrimage (1998) in the Doctor Who New Adventures subseries. [JC]
Ross, Leone
(1969- ) UK author, in Jamaica 1975-1990, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Phonecall to a London Rape Crisis Center" in Burning Words, Flaming Images: Poems and Short Stories by Writers of African Descent (anth 1996) edited by Kadija Sesay. Most of her subsequent fiction has been nonfantastic, though her third novel, This One Sky Day (2021; vt Popisho 2021), set in the imaginary Caribbean Archipelago of Popisho, is fully immersed in the water margins of ...
Another World
Videogame (1991; vt Out of This World; vt Outer World). Delphine Software. Designed by Éric Chahi. Platforms: Amiga, AtariST (1991); AppleII, DOS, MegaDrive, SNES (1992); Mac (1993); 3DO, Win (1994); Phone (2005); rev Win (2006). / Another World is a platform game (see Videogames) set on an alien planet, much influenced by cinematic conventions and visual storytelling techniques. Its design echoes that of such predecessors as the martial arts game Karateka (1984 Brøderbund ...
Blackwood, Gary L
(1945- ) US author, mostly for Young Adult readers, relatively little being of genre interest, tales like The Lion and the Unicorn (1982) – in which marginal fantasy elements attend hints that the Robin Hood story cycle is being evoked – being typical; but The Dying Sun (1989), though its guess that North America will have suffered an Ice Age by 2050 seems unlikely in the first decade of the twenty-first century, intriguingly posits a wilderness America, many ...
de Béthune, Chevalier
(? -? ) French author, who may or may not be related to the influential Béthune family, of Relation du Monde de Mercure (1750; trans Brian Stableford as The World of Mercury 2015) vividly describes a Mercury inhabited by various species of Aliens some of whom dwell in Cities built on rigidly geometrical Utopian lines, others of whom are winged, and all of whom are involved in exorbitantly depicted battles with each other. [JC]
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 ...