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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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Pendray, G Edward
(1901-1987) US public relations consultant, rocket scientist, founding member of the American Interplanetary Society in 1931, and author of several nonfiction works, including Men, Mirrors and Stars (1935), The Coming Age of Rocket Power (1945) and Rocket Development (anth 1948) edited with Esther Goddard and Robert Goddard; he was involved in installing Time Capsules in both the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs. As Gawain Edwards he published ...
Gerhardi, William
(1895-1977) Russian-born author of English parents, in the UK from before World War One; in active service during that conflict, mostly in Russia; in later, inactive years he gave his name as Gerhardie, apparently in homage to an earlier and more prestigious spelling. He is best known for works outside the sf field like Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925). His End-of-the-World novel ...
Scanners
Film (1980). Filmplan International/Canadian Film Development Corp. Written and directed by David Cronenberg. Cast includes Lawrence Dane, Michael Ironside, Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan and Jennifer O'Neal. 103 minutes. Colour. / This superior Psi-Powers movie easily outstrips Carrie (1976) and The Fury (1978). Pregnant women (we learn ...
Odgers, Sally
(1957- ) Australian author, who has also written as by Sally Farrell, Tiffany Mandrake and Sally Farrell Odgers; most of her work has been for younger readers and/or fantasy, such as the long Jack Russell, Dog Detective sequence beginning with The Lying Postman (2005 chap) with Darrell Odgers, or the variously shared volumes of the Out of this World sequence beginning with Slime World (2007 chap) [none are listed below]. The ...
George, Vernon
Working name of Scottish author George Shirra Gibb Vernon (1885-1959), whose first work of sf interest, Hamish Munro's Experiment: A Thrilling Romance of the East and the Antipodes (1935), is a fantasy published by a vanity house, and whose The Crown of Asia (1939) is a Near Future Yellow Peril Invasion tale, set in the 1940s, the target of the invasion being India. [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 ...