SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 July 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 20 July 2026
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Nojiri Hōsuke
(1961- ) Japanese author, former CAD programmer and game designer, whose early career comprised Ties to the play-by-mail and later Role-Playing Game Creguian. His follow-up, Rocket Girls, chronicled the activities of a space agency launching from the Solomon Islands. The Anime world soon seized upon the attractive potential of his all-female cast (to ...
First Person Shooter
Term used to describe a form of Videogame distinguished by a three-dimensional character's eye view of the world and fast paced, often violent, gameplay which requires players to react rapidly and acquire physical skills. "First Person" refers to the camera position – as opposed to the third person view of the main character used in most graphical Adventures and ...
Ruhen, Carl
(1937-2013) New Zealand-born author, in Australia from 1947, highly prolific from the early 1960s to 1989 with 78 reported novel publications – many from the high-output Australian "pulp" publisher Horwitz – plus numerous short stories and articles. His novels included some routine horror, not listed below. Ruhen is of sf interest as probably the principal collaborator on the film Tie Mad Max 2 (1982) with Terry Hayes and George ...
Lamming, George
(1927-2022) Barbadian poet, journalist and author, five of his six novels being nonfantastic; he remains best-known for the first of these, In the Castle of my Skin (1953), the semi-autobiographical narration of a Barbadian childhood, which has remained extremely influential. Water With Berries (1971) conveys a sense of the intermixture of lives and modes of a contemporary Black activist with a vivid, quasi-allegorical sense that each of these lives is inherently ...
Lermina, Jules
(1839-1915) French journalist and author, who sometimes wrote as William Cobb (usually for work set in America), active from 1859, suffering arrest for his opposition to the Second Empire of Napoleon III; in the 1880s, he became honorary president of a contorted dynastic descendant of the Theosophical Society (see Theosophy); his novels include two nonfantastic sequels to Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo ...
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 ...