SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 July 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Fringeworthy
Role Playing Game (1982). Tri Tac Games. Designed by Richard Tucholka. / Along with the board and counter Wargame Down Styphon! (1977 Fantasy Games Unlimited) designed by Mike Gilbert (based on H Beam Piper's novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen [fixup 1965; vt Gunpowder God 1978]), Fringeworthy was one of the earliest games to be set on ...
Hammond, Aubrey
(1894-1940) UK set designer, art director and illustrator, well known in these capacities; in active service during World War One. His first film as art director, Hyde Park Corner (1935), directed by Sinclair Hill, is Fantasy. Hammond is of importance as an sf illustrator almost solely for one work, his remarkably strong wraparound Art Deco cover for the first English translation of Thea ...
Space Habitats
The space habitat is a natural development from the concept of the manned Space Station (which see). Inevitably there is considerable overlap, with a broad and fuzzy dividing line between space stations which are primarily seen as way-stations or scientific observation posts, and space habitats whose occupants have come to regard them as home. J D Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929 chap) proposed ...
Planetary Romance
Any sf tale whose primary venue (excluding contemporary or Near-Future versions of Earth) is a planet, and whose plot turns to a significant degree upon the nature of that venue, can be described as a planetary romance. For the term to apply properly, however, it is not enough that a tale simply be set on a world: James Blish's A Case of Conscience (September 1953 If; exp 1958), for instance, ...
Cantril, Hadley
(1906-1969) US psychologist and sociologist whose The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic: With the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (1940), "with the assistance of" Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, prints for the first time the script by Howard Koch for Orson Welles's 30 October 1938 Radio broadcast of H G Wells's ...
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 ...