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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 ...
Lindsay, Vachel
(1879-1931) US poet, the clanging visionary primitivism of whose best-known work – the poems assembled in The Congo and Other Poems (coll 1914) – may have been ingenuous; some of the poems in Going-to-the-Sun (coll 1923) are of sf interest (see Poetry), one of them being adapted by John Clute for his sf novel Appleseed (2001). His Cinema criticism – ...
Beast Must Die, The
Film (1974; vt Black Werewolf). Amicus Productions and the British Lion Film Corporation. Directed by Paul Arnett. Written by Arnett (uncredited), Scott Finch (uncredited) and Michael Winder, based on "There Shall Be No Darkness" (April 1950 Thrilling Wonder Stories) by James Blish. Cast includes Tom Chadbon, Marlene Clark, Peter Cushing, Anton Diffring, Charles Gray, Michael Gambon, Calvin Lockhart and Ciaran Madden. 93 ...
Helprin, Mark
(1947- ) US author who served in the British Merchant Navy and the Israeli armed forces, experiences transmuted in A Dove of the East and Other Stories (coll 1975), which contains some fantasies. He is best known for Winter's Tale (1983), an epic Urban Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] set in an imaginary New York. The novel ...
Robbe-Grillet, Alain
(1922-2008) French screenwriter, director and author not associated directly with sf – or with any other genre, including the noir thriller – except subversively, as his films and novels could plausibly be called Thought Experiments in narrative deconstruction, with every narrative convention deliberately eviscerated, laid out anaesthetized upon the table of the book. As the prime exponent of the nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet could ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...