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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Calkins, Dick
Working name of US Comic-strip illustrator Richard T Calkins (1894-1962), who was born in Grand Rapids and studied at the Art Institute in Chicago. Beginning in 1929, Philip Francis Nowlan scripted and Calkins illustrated Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a comic strip based on Nowlan's "Armageddon – 2419 A.D." (August 1928 Amazing) and "The ...
Itō, Junji
(1963- ) Japanese Comics artist and writer. After a few years working as a dental technician he became a full-time Manga artist. Most of Itō's output is Horror, but often incorporates other Fantastika genres; his influences include manga artists Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino, plus authors Yasutaka Tsutsui and H P ...
Prince of Darkness
Film (1987). Alive. Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Martin Quatermass (Carpenter). Cast includes Lisa Blount, Jameson Parker, Donald Pleasence and Victor Wong. 101 minutes. Colour. / An old priest, guardian of a vat containing Satan as a green liquid, dies. Young physicists are brought to the derelict church by another worried priest (Pleasence) to analyse the strange powers here. The church is surrounded by bag ladies and vagrants (one being ...
Minsky, Marvin
(1927-2016) US computer scientist of considerable renown in the field of artificial intelligence, who at the time of his death was Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and also professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He advised Stanley Kubrick on the plausibility of a talking, sentient Computer by the year 2001, for the film ...
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 ...