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Thursday 5 October 2023
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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Laidlaw, Ross
(1931- ) Scottish author, mostly of historical novels and thrillers; of sf interest is his first novel, The Lion Is Rampant (1979), a Dystopian political thriller set in the impoverished Near Future Scotland of the 1980s, when the Scottish Freedom Party attempts to wrest power from the morally and political bankrupt south. [JC]
Mimic
Film (1997). Dimension Films. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins, based on "Mimic" (December 1942 Astonishing Stories) by Donald A Wollheim writing as by Martin Pearson. Cast includes F Murray Abraham, Josh Brolin, Charles Dutton, Giancarlo Giannini, Jeremy Northam and Mira Sorvino. Theatrical cut 105 minutes; Director's Cut 112 ...
Seiun Award
["Nebula Award"] The name for a set of genre prizes voted on by members of the annual Japanese Science Fiction Convention. These Awards take their name from the short-lived Seiun ["Nebula"], a single-issue magazine published by Tetsu Yano in 1954, and acknowledged as Japan's first. Despite the titular resemblance to the Nebula awards given by ...
Murakami Haruki
(1949- ) Japanese author, translator and former jazz bar proprietor, inspired by such Americana as the stories of Richard Brautigan and the Absurdist SF of Kurt Vonnegut. Murakami's laconic prose is thick with American allusions and quite unlike the insular intricacies of earlier Japanese literature. His rambling, pensive characters, often ...
Bolin, M C
(? - ) US author of two Ties of genre interest. Frank Capra's Original: It's a Wonderful Life (1996), based on the 50th anniversary of the great fantasy film by Frank Capra (1897-1991), does nothing to cast light on any of the ambivalences of the great original; Armageddon (1998) unadventurously novelizes the Asteroid disaster film ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...