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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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Man with the Power, The
Made-for-tv film (1977). Universal Television for NBC-TV. Produced by Allan Baltar and Rod Holcombe. Directed by Nicholas Sgarro. Written by Baltar. Cast includes Persis Khambatta, Bob Neil and Tim O'Connor. 93 minutes. Colour. / US government agent Walter Bloom (O'Connor) recruits Eric Smith (Neil) to help foil an assassination plot against the visiting Indian princess Siri (Khambatta). Smith's father, it is revealed, was actually an Alien from an ...
Petaja, Emil
(1915-2000) US author of Finnish descent, most of whose earlier fiction was fantasy rather than sf; occasionally he wrote as E Theodore Pine (once with Henry L Hasse), though only in magazines. He began publishing in 1935 with "The Two Doors" for the semiprozine Unusual Stories; his first professional sale was "Time Will Tell" in Amazing for June 1942. Some of his early work can be found in ...
Bechtel, Greg
(1971- ) Canadian author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Black Magic" in Challenging Destiny for March 1998; he has to date published only short fiction, the best of which was assembled as Boundary Problems (coll 2014). The title of this collection nicely expresses an essential component in the tales: a transgressively Equipoisal approach to ...
Webb, Catherine
(1986- ) UK author who also writes as by Kate Griffin and Claire North, often for the Young Adult market; her first works – like the Wizard Laenan Kite sequence beginning with Mirror Dreams (2002) – were fantasy. The Horatio Lyle sequence – beginning with The Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle (2006) and ending with ...
Escape Velocity
US/UK Semiprozine available online for download and print-on-demand. Published by Adventure Books of Seattle, Washington, run by Robert Blevins, who co-produced the magazine with Geoff Nelder of Chester, England. The print version was A4 size, with varying page numbers, glossy covers and some interior photographs, but little otherwise by way of format or design. It ran for four issues, November 2007 to February 2009, the first ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...