SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Borderlands [game]
Videogame (2009). Gearbox Software (GS). Designed by Matthew Armstrong. Platforms: PS3, Win, XB360 (2009); Mac (2010). / Borderlands is an "action RPG" (see Computer Role Playing Games), much influenced by First Person Shooters but in essence resembling a science-fictional variant of the hack and slash fantasy game Diablo (1997). ...
Brunngraber, Rudolf
(1901-1960) German industrial designer and author, active for many years. In his sf novel Radium: Roman eines Elements (1936; trans Eden and Cedar Paul 1937), a near-contemporary corner on the radium market (see Elements) causes Near Future troubles in a hospital using it as a Medicine to cure cancer. He also wrote the script for the film ...
Imperial Gothic
A term used mainly in literary criticism to describe a complex of motifs, venues and paranoia-inducing utterances whose main burden – that the Western world is under deadly attack from outside its borders – is sometimes narrated in nonfantastic terms, sometimes in terms expressive of Fantastika's not always temperate concern with who rules the planet (see also Gothic SF; Secret Masters). ...
Command & Conquer
Videogame series (from 1995). Westwood Studios (WS). / Command & Conquer is a series of Real Time Strategy games, played from an overhead view of the battlefield. As in Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (1992), to which the first Command & Conquer game was an unofficial sequel, the player must gather resources which they can use to build ...
Linklater, Eric
(1899-1974) Scottish author and playwright, in active service (underage) during World War One, an experience which, he stated twenty years after its close, transformed him from a "patriot" into a thinking man. He was proficient in various genres though he is best remembered for his novels, beginning with White Maa's Saga (1929), the best-known of these being Juan in America (1931), a picaresque Satire on ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...