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 ...
Honeywell, Antonia
(? - ) UK teacher and author whose first novel, The Ship (2015), begins in a Near Future London ravaged by various Disasters connected to Climate Change; though it is not primarily a Young Adult tale, an initial focus on its young protagonist, one of the survivors who now rule London ...
Ashing-Giwa, Kemi
(2000- ) US author who took her degree in integrative biology and astrophysics at Harvard and is currently working for a PhD at Stanford University. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Paper Suns" in Anathema: Spec from the Margins for September 2021. Her first novel The Splinter in the Sky (2023) is an intensely imagined Space Opera set in the aftermath of a failed war of interstellar conquest; following ...
Ratfandom
Highly informal UK fan group of the 1970s, several of whose members later became sf professionals. Based in London, Ratfandom and its satellites produced some of the most literate, witty and scurrilous Fanzines in that fertile period for UK Fandom; these included Big Scab (1974, 3 issues) edited by John Brosnan, Fouler (1970-1972, 6 issues) edited by Leroy ...
Strugatski, Arkady and Boris
(1925-1991) and (1933-2012) respectively; Russian authors. Before they began to collaborate in the early 1950s, Arkady studied English and Japanese, and worked as a technical translator and editor, and Boris was a computer mathematician at Pulkovo astronomical observatory. The brothers' first books made up the Noon Universe interplanetary cycle: Strana bagrovykh tuch ["The Country of Crimson Clouds"] (1959); Shest' spichek ["Six Matches"] (coll 1960); ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...