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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Impostor
Film (2001). Dimension Films presents a Marty Katz production in association with Mojo Films. Directed by Gary Fleder. Adaptation by Scott Rosenberg, based on "Imposter" (June 1953 Astounding) by Philip K Dick; screenplay by Caroline Case and Ehren Kruger and David Twohy. Cast includes Vincent d'Onofrio, Mekhi Phifer, Tony Shalhoub, Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe. Original short version (without ...
Discworld [series]
Bestselling comic Fantasy Series which is central to the popularity of Terry Pratchett (see his entry for further discussion). The Discworld setting is a flat world (see Flat Earth) supported by four elephants standing atop a giant spacegoing turtle, this whole ensemble complicatedly orbited by the local sun and moon. Beginning with broad ...
Smith, Dick
(1922-2014) US visual effects expert active from the 1950s through the 1990s in both films and Television in various genres; he is of particular importance for Horror and sf projects. Pursuing a career in make-up after US Army service during World War Two, Smith spent several years trying to break into Cinema before beginning work in the late 1950s for the newer medium ...
Ames, Mildred
(1919-1994) US author of novels for older children, a few of them fantasy. Of sf interest is Is There Life on a Plastic Planet? (1975), which effectively transforms the Paranoid theme of substitution – in this case a shop contains dolls identical to the young women its owner attempts to suborn – into a resonant tale of adolescence and identity. Questions of identity also lie at the heart of Anna to the Infinite Power (1981), ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...