SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 17 September 2024
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Avatars
In the world of Computers, Cyberspace and Virtual Reality as these concepts already exist, avatars are familiar as the visible icons or points of presence in virtual space of either human beings or software routines. Well-known examples include the representations of player and non-player characters in Videogames, ...
Airship Boys
In the sf of the late nineteenth century the sky is full of Balloons. Airships – a term which in this encyclopedia embraces all powered lighter-than-air vehicles – serve as forms of advanced Transportation in the Fantastic Voyages of Jules Verne and others, and in visions of progress articulated by authors like Albert ...
Xtro
Film (1982). Ashley Productions/Amalgamated Film Enterprises. Directed by Harry Bromley Davenport. Written by Iain Cassie, Robert Smith, based on a screenplay by Michel Parry, Davenport. Cast includes Danny Brainin, Maryam d'Abo, Simon Nash, Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers. 86 minutes. Colour. / UK sf/Horror exploitation movie in which a man, Sam Phillips (Sayer), is kidnapped by a UFO. Three ...
Claremont, Chris
Working name of US author Christopher Simon Claremont (1950- ) who first became known through his revitalization from 1976 of Marvel Comics's X-Men, an early 1960s title which had been temporarily retired but now became the bestselling comic in the field; the first five years of the strip are assembled as Uncanny X-Men Omnibus (graph 2006). Claremont scripted the title until he left Marvel in 1991 ...
Takeshita Ryūnosuke
(1984- ) Japanese lawyer and former child prodigy who enjoyed a brief and meteoric career as an author beginning with Tensai Eri-chan Kingyō o Tabeta ["Genius Eri Ate a Goldfish"] (1991). This, in turn, became the subject of some controversy when the seven-year-old Takeshita's book, daubed with understandably childish artwork, won the Masami Fukushima Writers Prize, leading to protests ...
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 ...