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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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Galactic Saga
Videogame series (from 1979). Brøderbund Software (BS). Designed by Douglas Carlston. / Of the four games in the Galactic Saga, by far the best known is the first, Galactic Empire (1979 BS, TRS80; 1980 AppleII; 1981 Atari8; rev 1994 Mac). This is perhaps the earliest commercial Videogame in which the player's goal is to build a ...
Black Scorpion, The
Film (1957). Warner Bros. Directed by Edward Ludwig. Written by David Duncan, Robert Blees. Cast includes Mara Corday and Richard Denning. 88 minutes. Black and white. / Giant scorpions and a rather good spider emerge from a cavern under the Mexican desert in this slow-moving, low-budget Monster Movie obviously inspired by Them! (1954). The stop-motion animation of the scorpions, ...
Half Japanese
American lo-fi punk band (sometimes written as ½ Japanese), formed in 1974 by the brothers Jad and David Fair. In their early days they were a shambolic but enthusiastic duo, comprising drums, electric guitar and strangulated vocals, with songs usually 1-2 minutes long; their first vinyl release, the 45rpm "Calling all Girls" (1977), had eleven tracks. Gradually they became more polished – or more studiously shambolic – adding further band members and longer songs; though Jad ...
"Space" Kingley
The tough and resourceful Captain "Space" Kingley was the hero of three UK children's Space-Opera annuals of the early 1950s. Beyond his pukka Britishness he displayed few individual characteristics. The sequence (which remains extremely difficult to date precisely; the dates here may not be reliable) comprises The Adventures of Captain "Space" Kingley (coll 1952) with stories by Ray Sonin, ...
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 ...