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Wednesday 25 May 2022
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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Moon [film]
Film (2009). Liberty Films UK in association with Xingu Films and Limelight/Lunar Industries. Directed by Duncan Jones. Written by Nathan Parker; story by Jones. Cast includes Dominique McElligott, Sam Rockwell, Kaya Scodelario and Kevin Spacey (voice). 97 minutes. Colour. / In the Near Future, a new Power Source – fusion fuelled by lunar helium-3 – has solved Earth's energy problems. Sam Bell (Rockwell) is coming to the end of his three-year tenure as the sole human supervising ...
Travis, John
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Splintered Forest" in Phantoms for March 1997, assembled with other short fiction in Mostly Monochrome Stories (coll 2009), a title belied by the author's vivid mixing of genres and tonalities (see Horror in SF). He is of sf interest specifically for the patently Equipoisal Benji Spriteman sequence comprising The Terror and the Tortoiseshell (2010) and The Designated Coconut (2012), a ...
Attanasio, A A
(1951- ) US author who has also published as Adam Lee. His rich educational background – BA (biochemistry), MFA (creative writing), MA (linguistics) – was early evident from his first relevant nonfiction, the essay "Beowulf and the Supernatural" (1971 Tamlacht #10), Tamlacht being a Fanzine he co-edited. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Spice Trails by Dr Joseph-Beyrd Markham" in Mount to the Stars for March 1971, though his first story to ...
Missile Command
Videogame (1980). Atari. Designed by Dave Theurer. Platforms: Arcade, Others. / Missile Command is a two-dimensional arcade game (see Videogames) in which the player must defend their home planet against endless waves of "Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles". Players have a limited supply of anti-missile missiles with which to protect six cities from incoming warheads. Unusually for a combat-based arcade machine, Missile Command is purely defensive; there is no way to strike back at the ...
Gainax
Influential Japanese Anime studio founded in December 1984, also known as Studio Gainax or Kabushiki-gaisha Gainakkusu. / Japan's 1981 SF Convention, DAICON III, opened with a short animated film from DAICON Film, a studio founded by sf fans (see Fandom) from various Japanese universities – including Takami Akai, Hideaki Anno, Toshio Okada, Yasuhiro Takeda and Hiroyuki Yamaga. After gaining further experience – such as a short for DAICON IV, the 22nd SF Convention in 1983; ...
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 publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...