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: Handheld Press
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 ...
Treasure Planet
1. Bulgarian animated film (1982; original title Planetata na sakrovishtata). Sofia Animation Studio. Directed by Rumen Petkov. Original voice cast unknown. Written by Boris Angelov and Yosif Peretz. 62 minutes. Colour. / This was the first full-length Bulgarian animated film, released twenty years before Disney's Treasure Planet (2002) – see 2 below – which was also a sf version of Robert Louis ...
Haibane Renmei
Japanese animated tv series (2002). Radix. Based on the Manga by Yoshitoshi Abe. Directed by Tomokazu Tokoro. Written by Yoshitoshi Abe. Voice cast includes Ryō Hirohashi, Junko Noda, Tamio Ōki and Akiko Yajima. 13 25-minute episodes. Colour. / A girl dreams of falling whilst a crow tries to prevent her descent. Meanwhile, cigarette-smoking Reki (Noda), wearing a halo and small pair of wings, discovers a giant cocoon in a ...
Hurley, Graham
(1946- ) UK television scriptwriter and producer and author whose first novel, Rules of Engagement (1990; rev 1991), is based on his own 1989 Near Future Television drama, Rules of Engagement (1989 6 episodes), set in the sealed-off English city of Portsmouth just on the eve of World War Three. His later books, mainly the ...
Irwin, Robert
(1946-2024) UK academic, mediaevalist, professional juggler (briefly) and author whose work in Arabian studies, of importance in itself, underpins the world envisioned in his first and most famous novel, The Arabian Nightmare (1983; rev 1987), which may be the definitive rendering of its central conceit: a mise en abyme-like dream narrative whose protagonist, upon seeming to awaken, only finds himself passing out of one story through a Portal into a deeper dream [for ...
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 ...