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Sunday 3 November 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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Greene, Graham
(1904-1991) UK author, partner of Dorothy Glover (see David Craigie) between 1939 and 1948; almost none of his more famous tales – which include Stamboul Train (1932; vt Orient Express 1933), Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Third Man (1949) and The Quiet American (1955) – contains fantastic elements. He is of moderate sf interest for his ...
Rushkoff, Douglas
(1961- ) US media theorist, much influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), and author of two novels of sf interest. Ecstasy Club (1997) is a Near Future thriller in which the Drug Ecstasy is used in an attempt to gain Transcendence in Cyberspace. / His second novel, also sf, has an unusual history. It was first ...
Dying Earth
A not uncommon category of sf story which has now developed its own melancholy mythology. Since the Sun is invariably moribund if not extinguished, this could also be called the dying-sun theme. Jack Vance gave this Far Future subgenre its name in The Dying Earth (coll of linked stories 1950). Important precursors are the section of H G Wells's ...
Repo Men
Film (2010). Universal Pictures in association with Relativity Media presents a Stuber Pictures production in association with Dentsu. Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Written by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, based on The Repossession Mambo (2009) by Garcia. Cast includes Alice Braga, Jude Law, Liev Schreiber and Forest Whitaker. Original release version 111 minutes; extended DVD version 119 minutes. Colour. / A surgical bounty hunter (Law, somewhat miscast) makes his ...
Van Ronkel, Rip
The most common form of his name used by screenwriter Alford Van Ronkel (1908-1965). He is of greatest sf interest for co-scripting the screenplay for Destination Moon (1950). Other genre credits include Destination Space (1959), which he scripted and produced, and – one of his last films – The Bamboo Saucer (1968), for which he wrote the ...
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 ...