SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
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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Yoshioka Hitoshi
(1960-2023) Japanese author closely associated with the visual media, whose vast output and populist panderings often occlude his deeper efforts at Satire and more mature experiments in Recursive SF. Dropping out of Waseda University partway through a literature degree, he worked part-time at the Anime company Studio Hard, and made his professional debut novelizing the non-sf film ...
Push
Film (2009). Summit Entertainment in association with Icon Productions presents an Infinity Features Entertainment production. Directed by Paul McGuigan. Written by David Bourla. Cast includes Camilla Belle, Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Joel Gretsch and Djimon Hounsou. 111 minutes. Colour. / A motley group of fugitive psychics in Hong Kong devise an elaborate plan to bring down the US covert operations division which has been forcibly harnessing the mutants' ...
Worldcon
The usual term – not only in Fan Language but in sf circles generally – for the World Science Fiction Convention, at which the Hugo Awards are presented. This major event began in 1939 and (following an early hiatus caused by war, from 1942 to 1945) continues to be held annually, most frequently in the USA, where it has attracted as many as 8000 attending. The Worldcon takes place under the ...
Cryostasis
Videogame (2009; vt Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason in Russia). Action Forms. Designed by Alexander Tugaenko, Dmitry Nechay. Platforms: Win. / Cryostasis is a First Person Shooter set on a nuclear-powered icebreaker trapped in the Arctic. The player character arrives under mysterious circumstances, to discover that he is the only living human on a derelict vessel occupied variously by frozen corpses and ...
Captain Flight Comics
US Comic (1944-1947). 11 issues. Four-Star Publications Inc. Artists include George Appel, L B Cole, Leo Morey, Zoltan Szenics and Maurice Whitman. 52-60 pages: usually 4-6 long strips, a 2 page text story or non-fiction pieces and, from #3, a few short humorous strips. / Pilot Captain Flight has various war-related adventures, sometimes two an issue. Normally there are no fantastic elements, but in #2 he invents the "Pilotless ...
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. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...