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Sunday 19 May 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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Pax Aeronautica
The sense that air Transportation must dramatically change the tactics and strategy of Future War was articulated in the eighteenth century by Samuel Johnson in his Proto SF Rasselas (1759): / Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas, could afford any security ... Even this valley, the retreat of ...
Harris, J Henry
(1875-1962) UK author whose uneasily fin-de-siècle sf novel, A Romance in Radium (1906), follows the investigative journey to Earth of a feathered and winged female Alien named Ma-Myliita, a member of the angel-like Murani from 100,000,000 miles away; her people are confused as to why Murani visitors, who arrived 5000 years earlier, remained on our planet and became mortal. The answer is Sex – or, as Harris puts it, ...
Dernier Combat, Le
Film (1983; vt The Last Battle). Films du Loup. Directed by Luc Besson. Written by Besson, Jolivet. Cast includes Jean Bouise, Pierre Jolivet and Jean Reno. 92 minutes. Black and white. / Made by Besson (later one of the best-known French directors of his generation) when only 23, the arty but vigorous Le Dernier Combat is low-budget and photographed in black-and-white Cinemascope, and has no dialogue at all. A young man (Jolivet) in an unspeaking ...
Muir, Edwin
(1887-1959) Scottish poet, translator and author, prevented by ill health from active service in World War One, though his early poetry reflects upon the consequences of that disaster for the world. He is best known for the translations with his wife Willa Muir of very nearly the entire works of Franz Kafka, introducing that central figure to the English-language world. It has been suggested that ...
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 a long sf-tinged poem, "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly); he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf proper with ...