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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 ...
Lebbon, Tim
(1969- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Simon Says" in Psychotrope for March 1994, and who until recent years almost exclusively specialized in Affect Horror and fantasy, though from the first an instinct for worldbuilding has constantly threatened to widen this remit; from early in his career he has tended to set his tales in variously designated (or background) landscapes in the throes of apocalyptic decay, often referring to this ...
Kerr, A W
(1848-1934) Scottish author of Space: A Mirage (1913), in which an extremely early version of the Galactic Empire is sketched, though in allegorical terms involving spiritually advanced "celestials" who watch and ward over Earth, despite opposition from the Sardonics who inhabit a planet of that name. [JC]
Big Meat Eater
Film (1982). BCD Entertainment. Director Chris Windsor. Written by Windsor, Laurence Keane. Cast includes George Dawson, Andrew Gillies, Big Miller and Howard Taylor. 82 minutes. Colour. / This Canadian musical pastiche of sf and horror films – a sort of designer midnight movie about an Invasion by two Aliens of a small town in the 1950s – waves its low budget like a flag and, despite incoherences, is cheerfully ...
Starling, Caitlin
(? - ) US interactive game designer and author who is of sf interest for her first novel, The Luminous Dead (2019), is set mostly Underground on a planet exploited primarily for its mineral deposits (see Colonization of Other Worlds); the protagonist, contracted to explore yet unknown cave systems for further resources, finds herself caught between the chthonic ...
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 ...