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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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Journeyman
US tv series (2007). Left Coast productions/20th Century Fox Television for NBC-TV. Created by Kevin Falls. Produced by Neal Ahern Jr. Directors included Andrew Bernstein, Leslie Linka Glatter, Frederick King Keller. Writers included Dana Calvo, Falls, Tracy McMillan, J R Orci. Cast includes Moon Bloodgood, Reed Diamond, Gretchen Egolf, Kevin McKidd and Charles Henry Wilson. 13 42-minute episodes. Colour. / In San Francisco, California, newspaper ...
Vinter, Michael
(1927-2002) UK author of several sf novels, usually Space Opera, for Robert Hale Limited, mostly as by T S J Gibbard, though one of them, Along Came a Spider (1980), was under his own name. As Vinter, he also wrote thrillers for the firm. [JC]
Datta, Sukanya
(1961- ) Indian zoologist, with a doctorate from the University of Calcutta, and author of both popular science books and sf short stories, the latter first assembled as Once Upon a Blue Moon: Science Fiction Stories (coll 2006). Her work, some of which could be described as Hard SF, focuses on the challenge of new Technologies in the complex world of Near Future ...
Pressor Beam
Term coined by E E Smith in Spacehounds of IPC (July-September 1931 Amazing; 1947) – initially as "a pusher or presser beam", so spelt – for a Force-Field application that pushes targeted objects away from the beam's projector, reversing the action of the fictional Tractor Beam. In the same year as Smith's story, Neil R ...
Petersilea, Carlyle
(1844-1903) US pianist and author of the Discovered Country sequence, a discursive spiritualist Utopia expounded in The Discovered Country (1889) as by Ernst von Himmel and Oceanides: A Psychical Novel (1890) also as by von Himmel, both novels being republished in 1892 as by Petersilea. The series cannot be called sf as such, but is interestingly specific about the afterlife containing no Heaven or Hell but a Platonic world whose ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...