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Wednesday 25 June 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.
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Asteroids [game]
Videogame (1979). Atari. Designed by Lyle Rains, Ed Logg. Platforms: Arcade, Others. / Asteroids is a two-dimensional arcade game (see Videogames) in which the player must shoot and ultimately demolish pieces of space debris before their Spaceship is destroyed by a collision with the increasingly many fragments – the smaller, the more rapidly moving. The design was derived from a ...
Heathcock, Alan
(1971- ) US author, mostly of short fiction, most of which is nonfantastic; active from the late 1990s. VOLT: Stories (coll of linked stories 2011) contains his best gonzo-grit early work. He is of sf interest for 40 (2022), set in a Near Future America devastated by Climate Change, Pandemic and civil unrest; the tale takes an ...
Morden, Simon
(? - ) UK geophysicist, teacher, editor and author who also writes as S J Morden. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Bell, Book and Candle" in Scaremongers 2: Redbrick Eden (anth 1998) edited by Steve Savile, which was included in his first collection, Thy Kingdom Come (coll 2002 multimedia CD; 2012), which comprises two linked sequences, one set in a darkening ...
Swindells, Robert E
(1939- ) UK translator and author who has concentrated for most of his career on Young Adult novels, several of them set in his native Yorkshire. Although most of his work has been fantasy, sf novels of interest have appeared at various points over this career, beginning with When Darkness Comes (1973), a Prehistoric SF tale movingly depicting the consequences of the incursion of ...
Barzman, Ben
(1910-1989) Canadian-born US scriptwriter and author – his collaborative script for the film The Boy with Green Hair (1948) directed by Joseph Losey was much admired – who was soon blacklisted for his earlier membership in the Communist Party, though he managed to write about twenty-five produced scripts under his own and other names; his brother-in-law Henry {Myers} was also blacklisted, as was his wife Norma Barzman ...
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 ...