SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 23 May 2024
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 21 May 2024
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Franklin, H Bruce
(1934-2024) US critic and academic, a cultural historian in various positions at Stanford University from 1961, in that year giving one of the earliest university courses in sf in the USA. In 1972, despite holding tenure, he was dismissed by Stanford for making speeches allegedly inciting students to riot against the university's involvement in the Vietnam War – a case well known to those interested in questions of academic freedom. He became full professor, again with tenure, at Rutgers ...
God Game
Term used to describe a form of Videogame in which the player has the powers of an actual or metaphorical god, as well as some of the limitations attributed to such entities by deist religions. A God Game will typically contain a simulation of a world, a nation or (more prosaically) a business, inhabited by mortals (or employees) conducting their own independent lives. The player is given specific powers – for example, the ability to cause divine earthquakes ...
Maynard, William Patrick
(1971- ) US author who has written extensively about Sax Rohmer and his notorious Yellow Peril character Fu Manchu. He began to publish work of genre interest with the authorized Sequel by Another Hand The Terror of Fu Manchu (2009), following this novel with The Destiny of Fu Manchu (2012). Relatively ...
Gu Shi
(? - ) Chinese author and urban planner who first came to prominence around 2011, with a number of stories that remarkably worked within the local tradition of didactic science fiction (see China), and yet also asserted a poignant notion of the likely emotional and ethical impact of scientific progress. Critics have parsed this as a particularly "female" reaction to the boys' club of the genre in China, although Gu herself has ...
Barr, Tyrone C
(? -? ) UK author. His sf novel, Split Worlds (1959; vt The Last 14 1960), sees 14 crew members of a Space Station survive the extermination (by Suicide) of everyone on Earth. Eventually they must land and breed and start again, though quarrelling furiously, in a fantastically transformed world. [JC]
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 ...