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Monday 16 May 2022
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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Last Wave, The
Film (1977). Released in America as Black Rain. McElroy and McElroy, Derek Power, The South Australian Film Corporation. Directed by Peter Weir. Written by Tony Morphett, Petro Popescu and Weir. Cast includes Nandjiwarra Amagula, Walter Amagula, Richard Chamberlain, Vivean Gray, David Gulpilil, Olivia Hamnett, Richard Henderson and Frederick Parsloe. 106 minutes. Colour. / The Last Wave was made long before the twentieth century ended. This should be kept in mind as its complex narrative ...
Armstrong, Peter
(? - ) Zimbabwean author, some of whose work is of sf interest. Hawks of Peace (1979) depicts an independent Near Future Zimbabwe from Armstrong's white settler perspective: devastation and violence accompany the installation of Black rule. In Cataclysm (1980), also set in the Near Future, the world after decades of Ecological degradation and Pollution suffers a catastrophic rise in ocean levels due to melting ice and other Disasters (see Climate Change); ...
Rifbjerg, Klaus
(1931-2015) Danish poet and author, who has published at least 100 books since 1956; in his sf novel, De Hellige Aber (1981; trans Steve Murray as Witness to the Future 1987), two adolescents are transported almost half a century forward from 1941 (see Time Travel; World War Two), but find little in the year 1988 to give them joy about Progress. [JC]
Frewer, Ellen Elizabeth
(1848-1940) UK author and translator, active before the end of the nineteenth century; her translations of Jules Verne were fuller and less tampered-with than most other versions of Verne during the years she worked on his books. It has been suggested that her financial independence allowed her to be firm on maintaining the integrity of her work. Frewer's later life seems to have been lived in private. [JC]
Lost Horizon
1. Film (1937). Columbia. Directed by Frank Capra. Written by Robert Riskin, based on Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton. Cast includes Ronald Colman, Edward Everett Horton, Sam Jaffe, Thomas Mitchell, H B Warner and Jane Wyatt. 133 minutes, cut to 118 minutes, then to 109 minutes; but 128 minute print (some lost footage being represented by stills) available from 2000. Black and white. / In this memorably sentimental, deft, trite, compellingly dreamlike, enormously popular ...
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 November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...