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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 ...
Buggles
Also known as The Buggles. A UK synth-pop band comprising Trevor Horn (1949- ) and Geoff Downes (1952- ); active from 1977. Masters of bright and electro-pop that both mourned the passing of the old world and celebrated the colourful and plastic near-future, The Buggles had a career that was appropriately shiny and transient. Their first single "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1979) was a number #1 hit; and the rush-released album, ...
Fantasy Magazine
1. A variant title (December 1933 to January 1937) of the celebrated Fanzine or Amateur Magazine (which see) Science Fiction Digest, founded 1932, of which Julius Schwartz was one of the editors. This in turn had incorporated The Time Traveller, often regarded as the first true fanzine (January 1932 #1), which Schwartz had published with Mort ...
Sayre, David
Working name of US engineer and author David Sayre Dayton (? - ) whose sf novel, The Great Improbability: An Autobiographical Mystery by the People of Earth (2010), a disquisitional tale, sufficiently personalized to count as fiction, in which six representative humans describe the enlightened future (see Utopia) they, lovingly, inhabit. He should not be confused with the American crystallographer David Sayre ...
Abbott and Costello Go to Mars
Film (1953; vt On to Mars). Universal Studios. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by D D Beauchamp and John Grant, based on a story by D D Beauchamp and Howard Christie. Cast includes Bud Abbott, Mari Blanchard, Lou Costello, Martha Hyer, Joe Kirk, Jack Kruschen and Robert Paige. 77 minutes. Black and white. / Two menial labourers, Orville (Costello) and Lester (Abbott), are inadvertently launched in a Spaceship and land near New Orleans; they ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...