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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 ...
Kimball, Janus
Pseudonym used by US author, journalist and media executive Richard Hack (1951- ) for Scanners II: The New Order (1991), which is Tied to the film Scanners II: The New Order (1990); see Scanners. Most of Hack's work is non-genre and published under his own name. [JC/DRL]
Cocoon
Film (1985). Fox-Zanuck-Brown. Directed by Ron Howard. Written by Tom Benedek from a story by David Saperstein. Cast includes Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Jack Gilford, Steve Guttenberg, Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Gwen Verdon and Tahnee Welch. 117 minutes. Colour. / Aliens disguised as humans come to Earth to revive their kinfolk who were abandoned millennia ago in cocoons on the ocean floor; the swimming pool prepared for their revival ...
Foon, Dennis
(1951- ) US-born playwright and author, in Canada from 1973, where he became well-known for his plays for older children; of sf interest is the Longlight Legacy sequence, comprising The Dirt Eaters (2003), Freewalker (2004) and The Keeper's Shadow (2007), a Young Adult family drama set in a Ruined Earth-like landscape (though this venue may be a ...
Virtual Reality
Since the mid-1980s, a popular item of sf Terminology, and for a century or so – in a rather more extended sense – a popular sf theme. In ordinary usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real (or at least all-encompassing) to the person who "enters" it; one essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it should be able to interact with it. To a degree all Videogames, as ...
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 ...