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Tuesday 24 June 2025
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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Hoyle, Trevor
Pseudonym of UK author Trevor Smith (1940- ) who has also written as by Larry Milne and as by Joseph Rance. Most unusually, Hoyle has been able to apply an erudite surrealism to works directed towards a mass market, though he had not, however, yet mastered this technique for his first novel, The Relatively Constant Copywriter (1972), a dourly joky Fabulation which he self-published. He remains best known for his Q series ...
Other Edens
UK original anthology series, consisting of Other Edens (anth 1987), Other Edens II (anth 1988) and Other Edens III (anth 1989), edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock. This was a curious series. The (ironic?) title is taken from the description of England in Shakespeare's Richard II, though the editors mistakenly say ...
Powered Armour
A now familiar device in (especially) Military SF, the most famous example being the Mobile Infantry armour described in great and plausible detail by Robert A Heinlein in Starship Troopers (October-November 1959 F&SF as "Starship Soldier"; 1959); this includes a jet pack for Flying. Heinlein's influence helped shape the Japanese sf trope of ...
Greenberg, Louis
(? - ) South African author, in UK for some years, much of whose work has been horror in collaboration with Sarah Lotz as by S L Grey. Selected titles (see Horror in SF) are listed below, in particular the Downside Trio beginning with The Mall (2011), whose two protagonists find themselves trapped in an Underground ...
Lloyd, J Wm
Working name of US sexologist, utopian theorist and author John William Lloyd (1857-1940), advocate of The Karezza Method of sexual intercourse, in which the male does not ejaculate, thus strengthening semen for eugenical reasons. His Natural Man sequence – comprising The Natural Man: A Romance of the Golden Age (1902) and ...
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 ...