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Saturday 23 September 2023
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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Christie, Douglas
(1894-1935) UK author who also published some work as by Colin Campbell, and thrillers as by Lynn Durie like This Yellow Slave (1933); his sf novel is The Striking Force: A Story of the North-West Frontier (1935), where Religion and Politics mix to create an unstable Near Future for Britain. [JC]
Pham, Hoa
(1972- ) Australian playwright and author, active from the early 1990s, much of whose work has been nonfantastic or fantasy. The young protagonist of The Other Shore (2014) finds herself able to communicate with the dead (see Psi Powers), and is ruthlessly exploited by her family, her government, and the dead themselves. The protagonist of Lady of the Realm (2017) suffers deeply ...
Adams, Richard
(1920-2016) UK author who became instantly famous with his first novel, Watership Down (1972), a long, grave, well-crafted Animal Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], written ostensibly for children but clearly accessible to adults as well; it was followed by the pendant titles The Watership Down Film Picture Book (1978), which retells the same story as adapted for the animated film ...
Ikarie XB-1
Film (1963; vt Voyage to the End of the Universe; vt Icarus XB-1). Filmové studio Barrandov. Directed by Jindřich Polák. Written by Pavel Juráček, Polák. Cast includes Radovan Lukavský, Dana Medřická and Zdeněk Štěpánek. 81 minutes, cut to 65 minutes. Colour. / This interesting Czech film is set in a giant spaceship (with elaborate interiors designed by Jan Záýzvorka) on a ...
Zone
Within the fictional worlds of sf stories or novels, whenever a space of some unusual properties is found, it can be defined as the zone. A zone's most characteristic feature is the way it differs from and interacts with the world around it. Sf most frequently depicts realities dissimilar to or even distant from that of readers' empirical experience, but no matter how surprising they seem, they are customarily based on a set of irrefutable yet decodable rules to be concretized in the course of ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...