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Friday 29 March 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.
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Vinge, Vernor
(1944-2024) US author and professor of mathematics at San Diego State University until 2000, when he retired to write full-time; married to Joan D Vinge 1972-1979. He began publishing sf with "Apartness" for New Worlds in June 1965, and appeared fairly regularly in Analog, his best early work being collected in True Names and Other Dangers (coll 1987), which contains ...
Portal
Videogame (1986). Nexa Corporation. Designed by Rob Swigart. Platforms: Amiga, AppleII, AtariST, C64, Mac, PCBoot. / Portal was an attempt to create a "computer novel", a form that was intended to more closely resemble that of hyperfiction (see Hypertext) than that of the text Adventure. The player takes the part of an astronaut sent on a solitary mission ...
Jennings, Gary
(1928-1999) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Myrrha" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in September 1962; at virtually the same time he published his first book March of the Robots: From the Manikins of Antiquity to the Space Robots of Tomorrow (1962), a nonfiction study of Robots for the Young Adult market. For some years Jennings published stories ...
Ruff, Matt
(1965- ) US author whose first novel, Fool on the Hill (1988), a fantasy set on a magic-irradiated college campus, was much influenced by previous models – some cited in the text – from John Crowley to Thomas Pynchon. His second, Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy (1996), is an Equipoisal gonzo sf novel set in ...
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 ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...