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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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Grass, Günter
(1927-2015) German artist, illustrator, sculptor and author, a significant creative and cultural voice in the long self-examination that the German world underwent (for cause) after World War Two; from the publication of his first novel, Die Blechtrommel (1959; trans Ralph Manheim as The Tin Drum 1962), he remained central to that interrogation, sometimes through the enraged and enraging mythopoesis of ...
Rennie, J Alan
Pseudonym of James Brown Gribbin (1899-1969) Scottish author of The Footstool of the Moon (1938), a Lost World novel set in Abyssinia where, having suffered Devolution, the Apes-as-Human survivors of a high ancient civilization threaten the safety of contemporary explorers; prehistoric species are discovered. [JC]
Starship Invasions
Film (1977; vt Project Genocide UK). Warner Brothers. Produced and directed by Ed Hunt. Written by Hunt. Cast includes Christopher Lee, Helen Shaver and Robert Vaughan. 89 minutes. Colour. / A small fleet of UFOs led by Captain Rameses (Lee) arrives at Earth searching for a new home for their race; their own planet Alpha's star is about to go supernova. After abducting some Earth people, Rameses's force, the Legion of the Winged Serpent, finds that his ...
Disney on Television
Aside from a one-off special in 1950 to promote Alice in Wonderland (1951), the Walt Disney Company's involvement with Television was initially to fund and advertise Disneyland – whose opening ceremony would be broadcast on ABC, watched by 70 million people. ABC had helped fund the park in return for a television series, Walt Disney's Disneyland (1954-1958), which was followed by ...
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 ...