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Saturday 5 October 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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Dinosaurs
Our cultural fascination with the great lizards of prehuman Earth has inevitably led to much sf in which – as never in history – humans encounter living dinosaurs. This may take place in Prehistoric SF set in an anachronistic deep past, as in In the Morning of Time (coll of linked stories 1919) by Charles G D Roberts. A modern enclave of surviving dinosaurs is somewhat less risible. This ...
Bennett, Harve
(1930-2015) US film/tv producer and screenwriter, Harve Bennett was an almost legendary figure in sf television production and writing, and fulfilled both those roles on The Invisible Man (1975-1976), The Bionic Woman (1976-1978), Gemini Man (1976) (see The Invisible Man), The ...
Pilgrim Award
Given at its annual summer conference since 1970 by the Science Fiction Research Association to a person who has made distinguished contributions to the study of sf, the Pilgrim is awarded normally for a body of work rather than for a specific book or essay, and has gone to both scholars and critics, academic and otherwise. Judging is by a committee of the SFRA, reconstituted each year. Recipients become Honorary SFRA Members; until 1990 ...
Middleton, John B
Pseudonym of UK newspaper proprietor and author John Bagot (1844-1925), whose The God of This World: A Story for the Times (1905), a Utopia set in 2005, espouses a benign union of advanced Technology and Religion. [JC]
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 ...