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Saturday 11 April 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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Gresswell, Elise Kay
Working name of Elizabeth Gresswell (1877-1944), née Kay, UK author whose Near Future Scientific Romance, When Yvonne Was Dictator (1935), concerns the election of the eighteen-year-old Yvonne initially as prime minister of the UK at a time of Economic disaster, and then, because of the power of her personality, as dictator (see Politics). In ...
ESP
An acronym for extra-sensory perception which was popularized by the pioneering exercise in parapsychology, Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) by J B Rhine, which attempted to repackage folkloristic notions of "second sight" or a "sixth sense" in scientific jargon; he is referred to in Psychoanalysis and the Occult (anth 1953) edited by George Devereux, where "occult" is understood primarily in terms of ...
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The
Film (1953). Mutual Pictures/Warner Bros. Director Eugène Lourié. Written by Lou Morheim, Fred Freiberger, based on "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (23 June 1951 Saturday Evening Post; vt "The Fog Horn" in The Golden Apples of the Sun, coll 1953) by Ray Bradbury. Cast includes Paul Christian, Cecil Kellaway, Paula Raymond and Kenneth Tobey. 80 ...
McGrady, Rev T
(1863-1907) Irish-born Roman Catholic priest and author, in the US from early adulthood; in Beyond the Black Ocean (1901), a temperate Lost World within the Arctic Circle turns out to comprise an Archipelago (see also Islands) of societies, each founded by refugees from various countries in the outside world, strays from America inhabiting the island of Toadia, and so forth. The original ...
Dean, Frederic Alva
(circa 1860-1936) US author of a Lost Race novel, The Heroines of Petoséga (1889), which traces the history of the survivors of an ancient Disaster which destroys pre-Attic Greece in about 1000 BCE, and who found the exquisite city of Petoséga on what is now known as Mackinac Island in present-day Michigan. But Petoséga is destroyed more than once by a vast ...
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 ...