SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Knox, Ronald A
(1888-1957) UK priest, journalist and author; ordained an Anglican priest in 1912, he converted to Catholicism in 1917, becoming a Catholic priest in 1919. Among his many books are several well-regarded if somewhat dull detective novels, volumes of Parodies, a new translation of the Testaments, and some genre work. A Still More Sporting Adventure!: Humbly Dedicated to the Authoresses of " ...
Planet Magazine
The oldest surviving continuously published Online Magazine started by Andrew G McGann, New York, in January/March 1994 and running for 35 releases (42 numbered issues but #9/10, #11/12, #13/16 and #27/28 combined and there was no #25) until June 2004 when it switched to a cumulative webzine or blogzine. It began as an E-Zine in plain text, via AOL, and did not convert to a Webzine until Autumn 1996 with ...
Johnson, E A
(1860-1944) US author, who may have changed his middle name from Austin to Augustus after gaining his freedom (Austin probably being the name of his owner); in his little-known Utopia, Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), set a century hence, the South is segregated in favour of Blacks. Johnson, who was African American, also wrote histories of Black life in America, and a work of Anthropology, ...
Leichter, Hilary
(1985- ) US author whose first novel, Temporary (2020), edges into the water margins of Fantastika through its protagonist's surreally transformative search for what, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, she calls "steadiness". Her experiences – for instance as a "human barnacle" – may be read metaphorically, though they are far more illuminating if taken as literal; under the latter strategy, ...
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 ...