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Monday 28 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.
Site updated on 21 April 2025
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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 ...
Time Travelers
Made-for-tv film (1976). 20th Century Fox/Irwin Allen Productions for ABC-TV. Produced by Irwin Allen. Directed by Alexander Singer. Written by Jackson Gillis from a story by Rod Serling and Allen. Cast includes Richard Basehart, Booth Colman, Sam Groom and Tom Hallick. 78 minutes. Colour. / In 1976 a deadly Pandemic erupts, caused by an unknown virus whose treatment baffles Dr Clinton ...
Play by Mail
Term used to describe a game in which the players communicate by (physical) post. Typically all participants send their moves in at regular intervals to a central moderator, who processes the orders simultaneously and returns the results. The moderator is generally the only individual involved to know the current state of all the pieces belonging to every player. Sf examples include Starweb (1976) and ...
Koster, Raph
(1971- ) US Game designer who has primarily worked on persistent Online Worlds. Koster's first major contributions were made to the free-to-play Heroic Fantasy Multi User Dungeon LegendMUD (1994 Mainframe, Net), of which he was one of the designers. He was later hired as lead designer for Ultima Online (1997), ...
Greengrass, Jessie
(1982- ) UK author some of whose shorter fiction, most of which has been assembled as An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It (coll 2015), is sf or fantasy, including "Winter, 2058", about a kind of Alien Invasion conducted via nodes where time is dislocated (see Time Distortion). The disquisitional elements in her first novel ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...