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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 ...
MC5
Detroit-based rock five-piece (the name is short for "Motor City 5"). Their raucous, energetic guitar-based sound anticipated, and directly influenced, the later emergence of punk rock, and is often read solely in those terms; but in fact their terms of cultural reference are all 1960s counterculture, anti-establishment, pro-Drugs, Sex and sf. Their debut album Kick Out The Jams (1969) possesses a splendid energy, not least in the ...
Suzuki Izumi
(1949-1986) Japanese author who, at the beginning of her troubled career, quit her teenage job as a key-punch operator after a Fanzine story gained an honourable mention in a competition run by the literary magazine Shōsetsu Gendai. Moving to Tokyo in 1970, she moonlighted as a bar hostess, nude model and actress under the name Naomi Asaka or Naomi Senkō. Her husband, the saxophonist Kaoru Abe, died of a drug overdose in ...
Red Faction
Videogame (2001). Volition. Platforms: Mac, PS2, Win (2001); Phone (2003). / Red Faction is a First Person Shooter, set on Mars and often suggestive of the less sophisticated scenes in Total Recall (1990). Its linear story follows the adventures of an oppressed miner (the player character) who becomes involved in a rebellion ...
Canada
The first serious Canadian sf work was James de Mille's posthumously published A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). In this Utopian satire, set in a Lost World, Western values are inverted (criminals are regarded as diseased, the ill are imprisoned, dying is deemed more desirable than living). Successors of De Mille were Grant Allen and ...
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 ...