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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 ...
Virtual Reality
Since the mid-1980s, a popular item of sf Terminology, and for a century or so – in a rather more extended sense – a popular sf theme. In ordinary usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real (or at least all-encompassing) to the person who "enters" it; one essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it should be able to interact with it. To a degree all Videogames, as ...
Contamination: Alien Arriva Sulla Terra
Film (1981; vt Contamination; vt Alien Contamination). Cannon. Directed by Luigi Cozzi. Written by Cozzi. Cast includes Lisa Hahn, Louise Marleau, Martin Mase, Ian McCulloch and Siegfried Rauch. 85 minutes. Colour. / "In Italy," says Cozzi, "when you bring your script to a producer, the first question he asks is ... What film is your film like?" This is one of several competing Italian attempts to exploit the success of Alien (1979). Its ...
Howard, Keble
Pseudonym of UK author John Keble Bell (1875-1928), whose novel of genre interest, The Peculiar Major: An Almost Incredible Story (1919), hovers Equipoisally between fantasy and sf, as its subtitle hints. The Invisibility which allows a British army officer to perform heroic exploits in World War One – while clearly influenced by H G Wells's ...
Haley, Russell
(1934- ) UK-born author, in Australia from 1961 to 1966, and New Zealand subsequently. His work, from the poetry of the early 1970s on, has been Equipoisal (see Postmodernism and SF) as regards any fixing of generic content, notably in the stories assembled in ...
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 ...