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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 ...
Alien Factor, The
US film (1978). Cinemagic Visual Effects. Directed and written by Don Dohler. Cast includes Richard Dyszel, Anne Frith, Tom Griffith and Don Leifert. 79 minutes. Colour. / In rural Maryland the killing of a young man is blamed on a wild animal; three men decide to hunt it down, but die. Elsewhere, a corpse is found: the coroner (Frith) tells the sheriff (Griffith) it suffered accelerated ageing, adding that the first victim's body was filled with Poison. ...
Verhoeven, Paul
(1938- ) Dutch filmmaker whose long career began in 1960 when he was still a student in Leiden, where he studied to Master's level in mathematics and physics. He refined his craft through the sixties, particularly in a documentary produced during his national service and on the iconic Dutch television series Floris (1968), where he made a star of the young Rutger Hauer. In the seventies he emerged as a major, if notorious, director of provocative ...
Busby, F M
(1921-2005) US communications engineer, long-time sf fan (from 1950) and author; co-editor with his wife Elinor Busby of the 1950s-1960s Fanzine Cry of the Nameless (see Cry), which won a Hugo award in 1960, producing some of this early work as by Renfrew Pemberton. He began publishing sf stories with "A Gun for Grandfather" for Future Science Fiction in Fall 1957 ...
Gunther, John
(1901-1970) US author, best known for the memoir of the death of his child, Death, Be Not Proud (1948). Of some sf interest are Eden for One: An Amusement (1927; vt Peter Lancelot: An Amusement 1927), in which a mage from another Dimension gives young Peter the opportunity to create an Alternate World to thrive in, which he takes; and The Bright Nemesis (1932), a ...
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 ...