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Saturday 14 September 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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Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Film (1999). A Lucasfilm Ltd Production. Directed by George Lucas. Written by Lucas. Cast includes Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson and Natalie Portman. 133 minutes. Colour. / Although the work of a man in his fifties, The Phantom Menace is the most juvenile of the Star Wars films. The opening film in a prequel trilogy, the movie suffers from being a first act. Characters are ...
Space Habitats
The space habitat is a natural development from the concept of the manned Space Station (which see). Inevitably there is considerable overlap, with a broad and fuzzy dividing line between space stations which are primarily seen as way-stations or scientific observation posts, and space habitats whose occupants have come to regard them as home. J D Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929 chap) proposed ...
Stevens, Lawrence Sterne
(1886-1960) American artist who also signed himself Stephen Lawrence or just Lawrence; some covers attributed to Lawrence were actually the work of his son Peter Stevens (1920-2001). The elder Stevens effectively learned how to draw by working as a newspaper artist and did not begin drawing for the sf Pulp magazines until the early 1940s, when the demand for newspaper illustration was diminishing. He was most admired for his interior illustrations, which became his ...
Quest for Fire
Film (1981). ICC-Cine-Trail (Montreal) Belstar Productions/Stephan Films (Paris). Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Written by Gerard Brach, based on La Guerre du Feu (1909 Je Sais Tout; 1909) by J-H Rosny aîné. Cast includes Rae Dawn Chong, Nameer El-Kadi, Everett McGill and Ron Perlman. 100 minutes. Colour. / This Canadian/French coproduction dramatizes the classic 1909 French ...
3-D Monsters
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine. Published by Myron Fass as Fair Publishing Limited. No editor named. One undated issue, 1964. / This unusual publication featured ten pages of rather blurry 3-D photographs and a bound-in pair of three-dimensional spectacles. Other content consisted of conventional photographs and short, uncredited articles on various Horror films and ...
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 ...