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Tuesday 17 February 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.
Site updated on 16 February 2026
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Lang, Herrmann
(? -? ) Ostensibly Hermann Lang (but note spelling of his given name), a German professor in the Polytechnic School at Karlsruhe, with attested publications in chemistry in the 1850s. However, there seems to have been no German edition of his sf novel, The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future (ostensibly trans 1859), and Lang is may be the pseudonym of a UK author. The novel presents in short compass a remarkable portrait of a world several ...
Hodder-Williams, Christopher
(1926-1995) UK author, pilot, composer and sound engineer; a member of the family which owned and managed his main early publisher. His first novel, The Cummings Report (1957) as by James Brogan, was not sf. Hodder-Williams began publishing sf with Chain Reaction (1959), which concerns itself, as does almost all of his fiction, with the relationship between Man and the machine Technology he has created, in this case through a mystery ...
Ringo, John
(1963- ) US author almost exclusively known for his Military SF, though he has in fact written some other sf and fantasy. He began his career with the first of the Posleen sequence, A Hymn Before Battle (2000), in which a Near Future Earth is informed by representatives of something like a benevolent Galactic Empire that an inimical ...
Religion
Familiar Definitions of SF imply that there is nothing more alien to its concerns than religion. However, many of the roots of Proto SF are embedded in traditions of speculative fiction closely associated with the religious imagination, and contemporary sf recovered a strong interest in certain mystical and transcendental themes and images when it moved beyond the Taboos imposed by the ...
Psionics
A common item of sf Terminology, usually referring to the study and use of Psi Powers, under which head this meaning is discussed. Never part of the vocabulary of J B Rhine, whose speculations fell on fertile ground in the early-middle days of Genre SF (see Golden Age of SF), the term seems to have first appeared in print in Jack ...
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 ...