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
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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 ...
Hanna
British/German film (2011). Focus Features/Holleran Company/Sechzehnte Babelsberg Film/Neunte Babelsberg Film. Directed by Joe Wright. Written by David Farr and Seth Lochhead. Cast includes Eric Bana, Jessica Barden, Cate Blanchett and Saoirse Ronan. 111 minutes. Colour. / Teenaged Hanna (Ronan) and Erik Heller (Bana), the man she believes to be her father, live alone in northern Finland, where he has been training her in survival and combat tactics ...
Foyle, Naomi
(? - ) UK editor, poet and author whose first novel, Seoul Survivors (2013), is a Near Future thriller set just before a meteor known as Lucifer's Hammer threatens to devastate the planet, as in Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer (1977), about a Comet striking Earth. A plot to use ...
Spacewar
Videogame (1962). Designed by Stephen Russell, J M Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen. Platforms: Mainframe, Arcade, Others. / While not the first game to be implemented using electronic hardware, Spacewar was the first such game with an original design, and the first to be widely distributed. Inspired by E E Smith's Lensman and Skylark series, the developers decided to write a game for the new PDP-1 minicomputer ...
Chainsaw Man
Japanese animated tv series (2022). MAPPA. Based on the Manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Directed by Ryū Nakayama and Masato Nakazono. Written by Hiroshi Seko. Voice cast includes Fairouz Ai, Mariya Ise, Tomori Kusunoki, Shogo Sakata, Karin Takahashi and Kikunosuke Toya. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / In the late 1990s Earth is plagued by Devils, Monsters that embody humanity's fears (see ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...