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Friday 20 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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BBC Radiophonic Workshop, The
Founded in 1958, this department of the BBC was tasked with providing both sound effects and original music for BBC radio and television programming. Desmond Briscoe (1925-2006) and Daphne Oram (1925-2003), who had previously composed original electronic music for radio works by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Giles Cooper, were the founding recruits. They soon established the Workshop's reputation for innovative, striking music and all manner of sound effects. ...
Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
Videogame (2001). Rage Software. Platforms: Win. / Scripted by Warren {Ellis}, Hostile Waters is notable for the quality of its dialogue and the skill with which the linear plot (see Interactive Narrative) is integrated with the gameplay. The game is set in the twenty-first century, after a global revolution against warmongering capitalists and politicians has established a liberal utopia based on ...
Paulsen, Gary
(1939-2021) US author who began publishing in 1966, at first mostly for adults, but who became best known for his fiction for the Young Adult market, where he was a significant figure since around 1980; he was highly admired for his pared-down but subtle style, and for his sensitive evocations of the American wilderness, which is central to much of his work. His first sf novels, beginning with The Implosion Effect (1976), are ...
Magrs, Paul
(1969- ) UK academic. Radio playwright and author, some of whose early nonseries fiction is nonfantastic, though To the Devil – a Diva! (2004) is about a horror film star, ageless through a Pact with the Devil [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], who threatens chaos when she re-ignites her career in a transgressive soap opera. Of more direct sf ...
Fleischer, Max
(1883-1972) Polish-born animator, inventor, film producer and author, in US from 1887. His invention of the Rotoscope (patented 1915), allowing animated figures to be traced from live action images, was significant in the early history of cartoon Cinema. With his brothers Dave Fleischer (1894-1979) and Lou Fleischer (1889-1976), he founded Fleischer Studios in 1921, where he made a short documentary, The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923), which was ...
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 ...