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Tuesday 24 June 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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Calverton, V F
Pseudonym of US author George Goetz (1900-1940), who also signed himself more fully Victor Francis Calverton, and who was, as an interbellum American radical and founder of the Modern Quarterly in 1923, a significant contributor to debates on sex, literature and politics; he was notorious for espousing bohemian values; alcoholism killed him young. Among his voluminous writings is an sf novel, ...
Jackson, Steve
(1951- ) UK Game designer, author and entrepreneur. With Ian Livingstone, Jackson (who should not be confused with the US Steve Jackson) founded Games Workshop and created the Fighting Fantasy series of Gamebooks, the two most important parts of the UK games industry before ...
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. ...
Adams, Richard
(1920-2016) UK author who became instantly famous with his first novel, Watership Down (1972), a long, grave, well-crafted Animal Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], written ostensibly for children but clearly accessible to adults as well; it was followed by the pendant titles The Watership Down Film Picture Book (1978), which retells the same story as adapted for the animated film ...
Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet
Role Playing Game (1999). Aetherco. Designed by Chris Adams, Barbara Manui, David Fooden. / Continuum is a game of Time Travel which contains one of the most thorough and rigorous explorations of the concept in the whole of sf. An extensive artificial vocabulary is employed to clarify the game's many disconcerting possibilities, from characters receiving advice from their future selves to duels fought by ...
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 ...