SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 14 July 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 7 July 2025
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Parsec
The official SI unit of astronomical distance; the name is a contraction of "parallax-second". The measure was introduced by UK astronomer Herbert Hall Towner (1861-1930). As the Earth travels from one side of the Sun to the other in half a year, parallax makes the position of any comparatively nearby star apparently shift. Using simple trigonometry, from the observed angular displacement of the star's measured position and knowledge of the distance between Earth and Sun the distance of the ...
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Board and counter Wargame (1976). Avalon Hill. Designed by Randall Reed. / Starship Troopers is a simulation of the fictional reality depicted in Robert A Heinlein's 1959 Military SF novel of the same name. Its gameplay concentrates on what has perhaps proved to be the most influential feature of the book, despite its enthusiastic political evangelism: infantry combat between ...
Brinsmade, Herman Hine
(1876-1968) US author whose Utopia, Utopia Achieved: A Novel of the Future (1912), depicts a vastly enlarged Near Future New York full of mechanical and cultural marvels, a self-regulating obedient workforce, and free health care. Brinsmade's romantic vew of twentieth-century Transportation – monorails, vast aerial structures that resemble Albert ...
Carter, Chris
(1956- ) US Television and film producer and director, the central figure behind The X-Files (1993-2002), which was enormously successful, and the psychic/supernatural thriller series Millennium (1996-1999), which was not. He co-wrote the movie novelization for The X-Files: Fight the Future (see The X-Files), ...
Gordon, Stuart [2]
(1947-2020) US screenwriter, playwright and director who co-wrote the sf or Science Fantasy play trilogy Warp! with Lenny Kleinfeld, the latter writing as by Bury St Edmund; it was performed by the Chicago Organic Theater company in 1971, had a short Broadway run in February 1973, and was adapted for Comics (thus coming full circle since it been inspired by various Marvel Comics titles, ...
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 ...