SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 7 September 2024
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 6 September 2024
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Heavy Gear
Role Playing Game (1994). Dream Pod 9 (DP9). Designed by Jean Carrières, Gene Marcil, Martin Quellette, Marc-Alexandre Vézina. / Heavy Gear is set in a sixty-ninth century much influenced by Battletech (1984). In the game's Future History, an economic collapse has caused the abandonment of Earth's interstellar colonies, including the world of Terra ...
Davis, Russell
(1970- ) US author, editor and publisher in many genres whose pseudonyms include David Cian and Christopher Tracy; he has edited a number of anthologies, most in collaboration with Martin H Greenberg. In his sf novel Touchless (2002) the protagonist, whose dead wife is in Cryonic storage, is offered the choice (reminiscent of an episode in ...
Sladen, Douglas
(1856-1947) UK academic, poet, editor and author, in Australia 1879-1884, in UK subsequently. Much of his academic and creative life reflected his years in Australia; his anthologies of Australian poetry were influential, and his long advocacy of the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870) generated studies, editions, and his only sustained sf novel, Fair Inez: A Romance of Australia (1918), set in the Utopian Australia of 2000-2007 CE, and featuring ...
Crichton, Michael
(1942-2008) US physician, film director and author, who also wrote as by Jeffery Hudson and John Lange. His first novel, Odds On (1966) as by Lange, a caper thriller which narrowly avoids the fantastic, was published before his graduation from Harvard Medical School; his medical background was evident here and throughout his career (see Medicine). Odds On was followed by several more pseudonymous titles, some of these having some sf interest. ...
Page, Kathy
(1958- ) UK author, in Canada from 2001, whose first novels – Back in the First Person (1986) and The Unborn Dreams of Clara Riley (1987) – are associational, though tinged with elements of literary fantasy. Island Paradise (1989), set a century after the Unfought War, promulgates an ambiguous worldwide Utopia whose citizens enjoy lives uncluttered by violence, but are bullied to die soon ...
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 ...