SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 27 July 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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Arthur C Clarke Award
This award has been given since 1987 for the best sf novel whose UK first edition was published during the previous calendar year, and consists of an inscribed bookend and a sum of money from a grant initially donated by Arthur C Clarke. In 2001 the prize money – until then a constant £1000 – was increased to £2001 as a gesture to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); it has since risen by ...
Alligator
Film (1980). Alligator Associates/Group 1. Directed by Lewis Teague. Written by John Sayles, based on a story by Sayles and Frank Ray Perilli. Cast includes Robert Forster, Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger and Robin Riker. 91 minutes cut to 89 minutes. Colour. / A pet baby alligator is flushed down a Los Angeles toilet (see California). Actualizing a familiar US Urban Legends, it or another ...
Herzl, Theodor
(1860-1904) Hungarian author, founder of Zionism in its modern form, perhaps most significantly in his nonfiction Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage ["The Jewish State: Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question"] (1896 chap). The title of Simone Zelitch's novel, Judenstaat (2016), is taken directly from this work. / Herzl's fiction was also influential, beginning with the fictionalized ...
Anderson, Michael
(1920-2018) UK-born film director, in Canada from 1981, whose career in Cinema began in 1936 as an office boy at the Elstree studios; his first great success, and perhaps his best known movie, was the World War Two adventure The Dam Busters (1955). Productions of genre interest include Vice Versa (1948), directed by Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) with Anderson as assistant director, which is based on the ...
Janson, Gustaf
(1866-1913) Swedish painter and author, whose pacifist novel, Lögnerna: berättelser om kriget ["The Lies: Tales of the War"] (1912; trans anon as Pride of War 1912), is set mostly in the Turco-Italian war of 1911-1912, but climaxes with a vivid depiction of a Future War in the air as waged by Germany. [JC]
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...