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Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Colomb, Philip Howard
(1831-1899) UK naval officer and author of several works on naval strategy; he was the main author [with a number of colleagues, see Checklist] of The Great War of 189–: A Forecast (2 January-21 May 1891 Black and White as "The Great War of 1892"; dated 1893 but 1892), a highly detailed Future War description of a very wide-flung "Great War" which begins in the Balkans with an attempted assassination, leading to a conflict where Germany ...
Seymour, Alan [2]
(1927-2015) Australian playwright, broadcaster and author, resident in the UK and elsewhere between 1961 and 1995. His sf novel, The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America (1969) – presented as a series of manuscripts found ages hence in the ruins of America (see Ruins and Futurity) and delivered back through time for contemporary readers – features a Black revolution that, though temporarily successful, ...
Held, Serge
(1892-1969) Ukrainian-born French consulting engineer and author of La Mort du Fer (1931; trans Fletcher Pratt as "The Death of Iron" [September-December 1932 Wonder Stories]), a Disaster tale – a mysterious virus destroys all iron in the world – which leads to a confused collapse of civilization (see ...
Half-Life
Videogame (1998). Valve. Platforms: Win (1998); rev PS2 (2001). / Half-Life is a First Person Shooter, notable for its depth of narrative immersion (see Game Design). It was the first FPS in which a storyline was presented without the use of non-interactive scenes interposed between levels set in different locations. ...
Koebel, W H
(1872-1923) UK author of The Singular Republic (1908), which describes a benevolent South American Utopia known as Neuvonie, where romance (and decimal currency) flourish, until fault lines in its trading relations with the rest of the world instigate a revolution, ending the experiment. [JC]
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 ...