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Friday 17 May 2024
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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Le Queux, William
(1864-1927) UK journalist and author (his father was French), active contributor to newspapers from the mid-1880s, and author of over 200 books in a variety of genres. Most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E Phillips Oppenheim – a notorious confabulator, he claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself – and detective novels, often with oriental colouring, beginning with Guilty Bonds (1890), about ...
Gale, Zona
(1874-1938) US journalist and author, an early feminist whose Romance Island (1906), the first of her many books, is a Lost Race tale set on an Island called Yaque somewhere "in the eastern sea" – its inhabitants have displaced it partially into the fourth Dimension – where the father of the protagonist's beloved, after being shipwrecked near it, has been proclaimed king ...
Twonky, The
Film (1953). Arch Oboler Productions/United Artists. Directed by Arch Oboler. Written by Oboler, based on "The Twonky" (September 1942 Astounding) by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner). Cast includes Gloria Blondell, Hans Conreid, Billy Lynn, Ed Max and Janet Warren. 72 minutes. Black and white. / After his sanctimonious Five (1951), about survivors of nuclear war, ...
Duel
Made-for-tv film (1971). ABC/Universal. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Richard Matheson, based on his original story "Duel" (April 1971 Playboy). Cast includes Eddie Firestone, Charles Steel and Dennis Weaver. 75 minutes; expanded and released outside the USA as a feature film, 90 minutes. Colour. / Universal Studios were so impressed by this television film directed by ...
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. His first professional publication was a long sf-tinged poem, "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly); he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf proper with ...