SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 February 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Rifts
Role Playing Game (1990). Palladium Books (PB). Designed by Kevin Siembieda. / Rifts is less a game of Science and Sorcery than it is one of Superscience and Supersorcery. The game's milieu is derived from a somewhat unlikely Future History, which begins with the destruction of a twenty-first-century scientific utopia by a devastating nuclear war. The psychic ...
Rhine, J B
(1895-1980) US botanist and early promoter – from a position at Duke University beginning in 1927 – of the nascent science or Pseudoscience of parapsychology, most famously through a series of tests designed to demonstrate the measurable existence, in terms of "abnormal" Psychology, of various forms of extrasensory perception (see ESP; Perception; ...
Rowland, Donald S
(1928-2022) UK author of a very large number of pseudonymous works, mostly with Robert Hale Limited; those used for sf titles include Fenton Brockley, Roger Carlton, Graham Garner, Alex Random, Roland Starr and Mark Suffling. For that firm (or for the highly similar house of Gresham) his Space Operas under his own name begin with Despot in Space (1973), which with Master of Space (1974) forms ...
BattleTech
Cardboard models-based Wargame (1984). FASA. Designed by Jordan Weisman. / One of the most commercially successful wargaming franchises ever created, BattleTech transplanted the human-piloted giant Mecha robots of Japanese Anime to a gritty far future setting of constant war. The original game is set during the thirty-first century, when hundreds of years of conflict have reduced an interstellar ...
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 ...