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Friday 17 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.
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Infocomics
Videogame series (1988). Infocom. / The Infocomics are a line of Comics which were sold as Videogames. Their plots are fully determined in advance, but at various points the reader can switch to a different character's view of the story; multiple readings are required to follow the entire plot. While their visual design and writing are generally unimpressive, the Infocomics are of ...
Alpers, Hans Joachim
(1943-2011) German sf editor, critic, Small-Press publisher, literary agent and author, sometimes as Jurgen Andreas; editor 1978-1980 of Knaur SF and 1980-1986 of the Moewig SF list. With Ronald M Hahn (1948- ) he edited the first anthology of native German sf (see Germany), Science Fiction aus Deutschland ["Science Fiction from Germany"] ...
Howard, Jonathan L
(? - ) UK game designer, involved with the Broken Sword sequence of occult-conspiracy Adventures (which see), and author who began to publish fiction of genre interest with "Between the River and the Road" (June 2001 Realms of Fantasy). The eponymous Antihero of the darkly humorous Johannes Cabal sequence, introduced in "Johannes Cabal and the ...
Eisenstein, Phyllis
(1946-2020) US teacher – in later years increasingly active in this capacity – and author, whose first sf story was "The Trouble with the Past", written in collaboration with her husband, Alex Eisenstein, in New Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) edited by Robert Silverberg. She and her husband wrote other stories together, and he was influential also on work signed only by Eisenstein. Her first book, ...
Mader, Friedrich W
(1866-1945) German author, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H Rider Haggard. Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932) is a juvenile which takes its Spaceship crew to Mars and finally – one of the first sf texts to ...
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 ...