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Sunday 16 August 2026
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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
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 ...
Blumberg, Rhoda
(1917-2016) US author of some 25 books of historical nonfiction written for children [not listed below]. Her most notable venture into "non-fact" speculation is the lighthearted The First Travel Guide to the Moon: What to Pack, How to Go, and What to See When You Get There (1980 chap), which assumes commercial Space Flight and space tourism from 1995 onward and is written as though for early twenty-first-century readers planning a vacation on the ...
Godsfire
Board and counter Wargame (1976). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Lynn Willis. / Godsfire is a simulation of strategic warfare between the governments of fifteen solar systems in an isolated galactic cluster. The background has a strong Hard SF flavour; notably, most of the game's Starships are restricted to Sublight speeds, despite their use of such exotic ...
Furukawa Hideo
(1966- ) Japanese poet, author and playwright, much garlanded with prizes in the literary field, but with roots and interests firmly in the world of Fantastika, with an insistent sense of bricolage, hommage and recursion. In the genre world, he might be most frequently compared to Yasutaka Tsutsui or Yōko Tawada, but teasing his own literary ...
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 ...