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Friday 17 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.
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Upstream Color
Film (2012). erbp. Written and directed by Shane Carruth. Cast includes Meredith Burke, Carruth, Kathy Carruth, Thiago Martins, Amy Seimetz and Andrew Sensenig. 96 minutes. Colour. / A conceptual designer (Seimetz) is infected with a mind-controlling Parasite (see Parasitism and Symbiosis) by a thief (Martins) who empties her accounts and leaves her with no memory of her ordeal; she and other victims are ...
Portwin, E T
(1912-2006) UK publisher and author, born Portwine (name changed legally), who sometimes wrote as by Elizabeth Portwin, his wife's name; as he normally signed his books E T Portwin, some confusion ensued. His books, which are Children's SF, begin with The Boy in the Moon (1945 chap) as by Elizabeth Portwin; of greatest interest is Death Swamp and Other Adventure Stories (coll 1946), whose title novella dramatizes the almost fatal ...
Leinster, Murray
Pseudonym – pronounced "Lenster" as in the Irish province of Leinster – under which US author William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975) was best known in the sf field, and under which he wrote almost all his work in the genre; the exceptions were a few novels as Jenkins [see below] and some stories in magazines, mainly those in the Bud Gregory series as by William Fitzgerald, plus a small number as by Will Jenkins or Will F Jenkins. One of the very few authors of American ...
Oyebanji, Adam
(? - ) Scottish lawyer and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Frontier" in Adventurer for January 1987. His first novel Braking Day (2022) is a Generation Starship tale whose First Crew had left an AI-dominated tyranny on Earth, the destination being a planet orbiting Tau Ceti. After six generations have passed, the expedition's three great ships, ...
Finney, Charles G
(1905-1984) US newspaperman and author – named after but apparently not related to the famous revivalist minister, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) – who spent the years 1927-1929 with the US infantry in Tientsin, China; an oriental influence pervades most of his work. His novels and stories, though Fantasy rather than sf, have been influential throughout the field, especially his famous The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), filmed less than ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...