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 ...
Dexter, William
Pseudonym of UK author William Thomas Pritchard (1906-1985), whose two sf novels make up the short Denis Grafton series, in which concerns about the End of the World through nuclear World War Three are articulated, fairly incoherently, via a metaphysical Space Opera plot. In World of Eclipse (1954), after life on Earth has been eliminated by a "thorium" bomb, a few ...
Cinema
The basis on which films and film-makers have been selected for inclusion in this volume is discussed in the Introduction to the Second Book Edition. / From the outset, the cinema specialized in illusion to a degree that had been impossible on the stage. Sf itself takes as its subject matter that which does not exist, now, in the real world (though it might one day), so it has a natural affinity with the cinema: the illusory ...
Totò nella Luna
Italian film (1958; vt Totò in the Moon). Maxima Films/Variety Films/Montfluor Films. Directed by Steno [Stefano Vanzina]. Written by Sandro Continenza, Ettore Scola, and Steno, based on a story by Lucio Fulci and Steno. Cast includes Jim Dolen, Sylva Koscina, Richard McNamara, Sandra Milo, Luciano Salce, Agostino Salvietti, Ugo Tognazzi, Renato Tontini and Totò. 101 minutes. Black and white. / While mysterious Aliens, represented by ...
Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US translator, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970, who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) 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 ...