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Tuesday 8 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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Saga of Tanya the Evil, The
Japanese animated tv series (2017). Original title Yōjo Senki. Based on the Light Novel and Manga written by Carlo Zen, illustrated by Shinobu Shinotsuk and Chika Tōjō respectively. NUT studio. Directed by Yutaka Uemura. Written by Kenta Ihara. Voice cast includes Hideaki Tezuka, Nobuo Tobita, Kôsuke Toriumi and Aoi Yûki. Twelve 24-minute episodes (plus a recap episode ...
Blue Thunder
Film (1983). Rastar/Gordon Carroll Productions. Directed John Badham. Written by Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby. Cast includes Candy Clark, Malcolm McDowell, Warren Oates, Roy Scheider and Daniel Stern. 110 minutes. Colour. / Borderline sf set in a very Near-Future Los Angeles, Blue Thunder tells the story of Murphy (Scheider), a helicopter-based police officer, asked to try out a new supercopter: it can see through ...
Interactive Fiction
Term apparently coined by Robert Lafore to describe the text Adventures he wrote for Adventure International (AI), among them the crime game Local Call For Death (1979 AI, TRS80). The phrase came into general use when it was employed by the development house Infocom to promote such works as A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985) by emphasizing their connections with literature as opposed to ...
Macleod, Joseph
(1903-1984) UK barrister, poet, broadcaster and author, active from before 1930; much of his poetry was published as by Adam Drinan. His sf Satire, Overture to Cambridge: A Satirical Story (1936), is based on his own unpublished play staged at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, in 1933. Couched as a Scientific Romance, the tale eschews the Modernist bent ...
Sins of a Solar Empire
Videogame (2008). Ironclad Games (IG). Platforms: Win. / Solar Empire is a simulation of space warfare which fuses the conventions of the Real Time Strategy form with those of 4X Games. While many of the design elements it shares with 4X Games were borrowed by the earliest examples of the RTS form (and have become ...
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 ...