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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 ...
Loontown
US live-action and animated film (2023). Positronish Productions. Directed by Nir Yaniv. Written by Lavie Tidhar. Cast includes Kenneth Jay, Al Lubel, Digger Mesch, Nathan Osgood, Katie Snyder, Russell Wilcox and Anne Wittman. 18 minutes. Colour. / Jokingly described by its creators as "The Citizen Kane of balloon noir movies" (itself a reference to the Boston Globe's description of Bobcat Goldthwait's ...
Buckle, Richard
(1916-2001) UK music critic who specialized in ballet, and author of a fantasticated Utopia, John Innocent at Oxford: A Fantasy (1939), which depicts a late-twentieth-century Oxford (and hence Britain) as though Max Beerbohm or Ronald Firbank had dreamed it – extravagant, witty, class-obsessed, boneless – all hilariously rendered. It may well be the last "irresponsible" pastoral utopia published before ...
Wild Blue Yonder, The
Film (2005). Wener Herzog Filmproduktion, Tetramedia, West Park Pictures. Written and directed by Wener Herzog (1942- ). Cast includes Brad Dourif. 81 minutes. Colour. / An unnamed Alien (Dourif) from the titular water planet arrives on Earth, seemingly one of many refugees from his dying world, though he is the only one we see and he does not seem to know the whereabouts of any of the others. The aliens attempt to set up a capital ...
Moon Zero Two
Film (1969). Hammer/Warner Bros. Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Written by Michael Carreras. Cast includes Adrienne Corri, Warren Mitchell, James Olson and Catherine von Schell. 100 minutes. Colour. / At the same time as the first actual Moon landing, Hammer Films were making this quasi-Western set on the Moon, envisaged as a rip-roaring Frontier area; the results are absurd. One of the hoariest of pulp Western plots is dressed up with a lot of colourful space hardware: a poor but ...
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 ...