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Thursday 12 March 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.
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Independent Games
Independent Games can be defined as games owned by their creators, rather than by a large development or publishing company which exerts some degree of control over the design. Such games are often also published by the individuals who designed them. This definition is difficult to apply precisely; games may be developed and published independently and then rereleased by a major publisher, for example. In practice, however, the distinction between games which are developed independently and ...
Halberstam, Michael J
(1932-1980) US medical doctor and author whose The Wanting of Levine (1978) depicts a Near Future US presidential campaign which ends in the 1988 election of the Jewish politician Levine, whose wry wisdom may bring the nation back from the violent civil strife that has already begun to balkanize the land. Halberstam was murdered by a burglar whom he had surprised on returning home with his wife. [JC]
Vaux, Patrick
Pseudonym of Scottish author Maclaren Mein (1872-1932), whose fiction under this name comprises nautical adventures such as the non-genre Thews of England (1903); some of these tales are also examples of the Future War genre. The Shock of Battle (1906) delays the outbreak of something like World War One to 1919, with Germany ultimately losing; much of the action takes place around the British Virgin ...
Hollow Earth
The concept of the Earth as a hollow, spherical shell with a habitable, internal concave surface accessible through polar openings or caves, or by mechanical bores, has long been a significant motif in sf. The idea's dual origins, from Religion and Pseudoscience, are still potent. Traditionally Hell was sited inside the Earth, a notion that persisted at least until the eighteenth century, when a theologian proposed that Earth's ...
Elliott, H Chandler
(1906-1978) Canadian-born physician, university teacher of medicine and author, in the US for many years; he began publishing work of genre interest with "Inanimate Objection" in Galaxy for February 1954. In his sf novel, Reprieve from Paradise (1955), Polynesians have survived an atomic World War Three, and forty centuries after their shocked discovery of the Post-Holocaust world, ...
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, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...