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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.
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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 ...
Lanza, Clara
(1859-1939) US author, a marquise by marriage into the Italian nobility in 1878, whose Mr Perkins' Daughter (1881) flirts with Amnesia on the skirts of the fantastic; her sf novel, Scarabaeus: The Story of an African Beetle (1892) with James Clarence Harvey (1865-1945), features a camera capable of photographing the past (see Time Viewer), a scene in which retinal images identify a murderer (a commonplace of ...
Phase IV
Film (1973). Alced/Paramount/PBR Productions. Directed by Saul Bass. Written by Mayo Simon. Cast includes Nigel Davenport, Lynne Frederick and Michael Murphy. 91 minutes, cut to 84 minutes. Colour. / A battle of wits takes place between, on the one hand, a fanatical Scientist and two others living in a desert-based experimental dome and, on the other, an ant species which has acquired Intelligence. The script substitutes ...
Phantasm
Film (1978). New Breed. Directed, produced, written and photographed by Don Coscarelli. Cast includes Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm and Bill Thornbury. 90 minutes, cut to 89 minutes. Colour. / At the independent, low-budget, exploitation end of the movie market, small miracles sometimes occur that could not take place inside a major studio. Phantasm is one such, a spirited blend of Horror, surrealism and sf, in which the ...
Boussenard, Louis
(1847-1910) French physician and author in various genres whose popular scientific romances, which have some speculative content, often appeared in Le Journal des Voyages. He remains of greatest genre interest for Les secrets de Monsieur Synthèse ["The Secrets of Mr Synthesis"] (1888-1889 Journal des Voyages; 1888) and its sequel, 10,000 ans dans un bloc de glace (17 ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...