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Sunday 9 August 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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Robinson, Phil
(1847-1902) UK journalist and author of stories and essays mostly set in a romanticized India or Africa (see Imperialism); his collections, usually interspersing fiction and nonfiction, include some sf. Of strongest interest may be "The Hunting of the Soko" (in Under the Punkah, coll 1881), an Apes as Human tale that may have influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs's creation of ...
Overpopulation
In 1798 the UK economist Thomas R Malthus (1766-1834) published his Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, arguing that a Utopian situation of peace and plenty would be impossible to achieve because the tendency of populations, in the absence of the checks of war, famine and plague, to increase exponentially would result in society's continually outgrowing its resources. In the second edition of 1803, replying to ...
Woods, Lance
(1961- ) US author whose Heroic Park (2012) is set mainly in a Near Future Theme Park where ordinary humans can escape constant comparisons with the Superheroes who infest the world outside. But trouble looms, both in the caverns Underground where the park is run, and in the manufactured New York ...
Alhaiza, Adolphe
(1839-1922) French journalist and author, a disciple of the socialist philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1839). Of sf interest is Cybèle, Voyage extraordinaire dans l'avenir (1891 as by Jean Chambon; trans Brian Stableford as Cybele: An Extraordinary Voyage into the Future 2013), in which a young man is transported by astral projection to the planet Cybèle, across the galaxy and identical to Earth, except for the ...
City of Ember
Film (2008). Walden Media/20th Century Fox. Directed by Gil Kenan. Written by Caroline Thompson, based on the novel The City of Ember (2003) by Jeanne DuPrau. Cast includes Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway. 92 minutes. Colour. / Faced with an unnamed global Disaster, a group of Scientists construct an ...
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 ...