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 ...
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 ...
Shaw, Stanley
(1870-? ) Australian author in whose sf novel, The Locust Horde (1924), the eponymous swarm consists not of insects on the rampage but Russian women and children, who are involved in a Near Future conspiracy to flood America with immigrants. [JC]
Raine, Craig
(1944- ) UK poet whose first book, The Onion, Memory (coll 1978 chap), demonstrated his capacity to illuminate the world through estranged images, a technique which came to full fruition in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (coll 1979 chap), the title poem of which represents – in language which convincingly manifests a principle central to Fantastika as a whole, that the fantastic may be best grasped through ...
Boston, Bruce
(1943- ) US poet (see Poetry) and prose author whose early work tended to the surreal, but who began – with stories like "Break" for New Worlds 7 (anth 1974) edited by Hilary Bailey and Charles Platt – to invoke fantasy and sf themes. His early poetry – much of it not genre at all, and almost all of it couched in a classically lucid voice ...
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 ...