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Saturday 22 January 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.
Site updated on 21 January 2022
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Fantastic Adventures Yearbook
One of the many reprint Digest-size magazines issued by Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Co, which in 1965 had bought rights to the Ziff-Davis sf magazines. Its only issue, containing stories reprinted from Fantastic Adventures 1949-1952, was released in 1970. [BS/PN] links / Galactic Central illustrated checklist
Day the Earth Caught Fire, The
Film (1961). British Lion/Pax/Universal. Produced and directed by Val Guest. Cast includes Arthur Christiansen, Edward Judd, Leo McKern and Janet Munro. Written by Wolf Mankowitz, Guest. 99 minutes, cut to 90 minutes (US). Black and white. / Val Guest, who had made The Quatermass Xperiment (1956) and other sf/horror films for Hammer in the 1950s, excelled himself with this intelligent Disaster movie. After a framing scene, in which reporter Peter Stenning (Judd) walks through the deserted ...
Garn, Jake
Working name of US politician and author Edwin Jacob Garn (1932- ), a Republican, US Senator for Utah 1974-1993. During his tenure, he flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985, the first sitting member of the US Congress to engage personally in Space Flight. His sf novel, Night Launch (1989) with Stephen Paul Cohen of the Brookings Institute, posits a Near Future neo-Nazi terrorist takeover of the Discovery, but justice triumphs. [JC]
Suzuki Izumi
(1949-1986) Japanese author who, at the beginning of her troubled career, quit her teenage job as a key-punch operator after a Fanzine story gained an honourable mention in a competition run by the literary magazine Shōsetsu Gendai. Moving to Tokyo in 1970, she moonlighted as a bar hostess, nude model and actress under the name Naomi Asaka or Naomi Senkō. Her husband, the saxophonist Kaoru Abe, died of a drug overdose in 1978, after which Suzuki threw herself into an incandescent ...
Redfinn, Michael
(? - ) US author of Being (1988), an sf novel in which UFOs are proved to exist, justifying general Paranoia, as there has been a conspiracy to conceal them. [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. 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 ...