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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 ...
Puni Puni Poemy
Japanese original video animation series (2001); original title Puni Puni ☆ Poemii. J.C.Staff. Directed by Shinichi Watanabe. Written by Yōsuke Kuroda. Voice cast includes Yuka Imai, Ryu Itou and Yumiko Kobayashi. Two 30-minute episodes. Colour. / After her parents and Robot dog are crucified by an Alien with odd genitals, schoolgirl Poemi Watanabe (Kobayashi) moves in with her friend ...
Pronzini, Bill
Working name of US author William John Pronzini (1943- ), prolific and admired in several genres, notably crime fiction, since his first book, The Stalker (1971). Though he has published some very effective Horror, including Masques: A Novel of Terror (1981), and several other novels – including Night Screams (1979) and Prose Bowl (1980), both with Barry N ...
Explorers
Film (1985). Edward S Feldman/Paramount. Directed by Joe Dante. Written by Eric Luke. Cast includes Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson. 109 minutes. Colour. / Three schoolboys (Hawke, Phoenix, Presson), tipped off by a dream, employ a Computer to help create a sphere that can move very quickly and is impervious to Gravity; they use it to power a ...
Time Viewer
A passive form of Time Machine which typically displays, but allows no interaction with, scenes from the past. Almost certainly the first clearly envisioned example of the device appears in "L'historioscope" (in Fantaisies, coll 1883; trans Brian Stableford in News from the Moon, anth 2007, as "The Historioscope") by Eugène Mouton, where an electrical ...
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 ...