SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Alpha Incident, The
Film (1978; vt Gift from a Red Planet). Rebane Productions. Directed by Bill Rebane. Screenplay by Ingrid Neumayer. Cast includes George "Buck" Flower (or Buck Flower), John Goff, Ralph Meeker, Stafford Morgan, Ray Szamanda. 95 minutes. Colour. / A deadly Alien microorganism, brought to Earth from Mars by a returning space probe, is being secretly transported by train to a special research facility when an over-curious ...
Lichtman, Robert
(1942-2022) US fan editor and publisher, active in Fandom since the late 1950s; a contributor to various amateur press associations (see APA) including FAPA, OMPA and SAPS; married to Carol Carr from 2000 until her death in 2021. He published many Fanzines from 1959 [see Fancyclopedia 3 under links ...
Chatterton, E Keble
(1878-1944) UK author, active from around the turn of the century, best known for nonfiction works on maritime history, and for his dramatic depictions of naval warfare; he commanded a navy mine-sweeper during World War One. Of his fiction, the Z-Rays sequence – comprising Through Sea and Air (1929), Adventurers of the Air (1930) and The Sky Riders (1930) – is of most sf interest, as a European ...
Superman [character]
1. US Comic strip created by writer Jerry Siegel (1914-1996) and artist Joe Shuster (1914-1992), loosely inspired by Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), which Siegel had reviewed in his fanzine, Science-Fiction, in 1932. He was an sf fan, creator of several early Fanzines, including Science Fiction (5 issues from October 1932), in which ...
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 ...