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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 ...
Unsworth, Tania
(? - ) UK-born author resident in the USA from early adulthood, daughter of the novelist Barry Unsworth (1930-2012); her early work, beginning with The Seahorse (2002) is nonfantastic. She is of sf interest for The One Safe Place (2014), a Young Adult Near Future tale set initially on a farm declining inexorably due to catastrophic ...
Scheerbart, Paul
(1863-1915) German author, who also wrote as by Kuno Küfer; most of his sf and fantasy remained untranslated until the twenty-first century. Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroiden-Roman Mit 14 Strichätzungen von Alfred Kubin auf Tafeln (1913; trans Christina Svendsen as Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel 2012) is a Utopia set far from our solar system in a planetoid called Pallas; the eponymous ...
Matthews, Ronald
(1903-1967) UK journalist, noted foreign correspondent, and author of a Dystopia, Red Sky at Night (1951), a Near Future tale in which a leftist tyranny is overthrown by a Roman Catholic crusade. [JC]
Raspe, Rudolf Erich
(1737-1794) German-born propagandist, amateur geologist, cataloguer, flim-flam artist, translator and author, in the UK from 1775. His career was harum-scarum; though he edited the posthumous papers of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) as Oeuvres philosophiques latines et francoises de feu Mr de Leibniz (1765), and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1769, he was more than once in deep financial trouble (the Royal Society ejected him in 1775) and narrowly escaped ...
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 ...