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.
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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 ...
Horrors of Spider Island
Film (1959, released 1960; vt The Body in the Web; vt It's Hot in Paradise). Produced by Gaston Hakim and Wolf C Hartwig. Directed by Fritz Böttger (credited as Jamie Nolan). Written by Böttger, Eldon Howard and Albert G Miller. Cast includes Alex D'Arcy, Helga Franck, Dorothee Parker (credited as Norma Townes) and Barbara Valentin. 89 minutes, sometimes cut to 82 minutes. Black and white. / Nightclub owner Gary (D'Arcy) interviewing assorted women for ...
Roberts, Terence
Pseudonym of Ivan Terence Sanderson (1911-1973), Scottish-born US author and illustrator on the natural sciences, as in Living Treasure (1941), about wildlife around the Caribbean. As Roberts his sf novel was Report on the Status Quo (1955), a Disaster story set in 1958-1959, after World War Three has catapulted the world into a sudden Climate Change accompanied by ...
Kafka, Franz
(1883-1924) Czech author, a Jew who wrote in German, active for about a decade before 1914; he was a full tri-cultural inhabitant – a German-speaking Jew in Prague – of the cosmopolitan world that would eventually become Czechoslovakia (see Czech and Slovak SF) after the trauma of World War One, a civilization whose death throes began in 1938. Belying any sense that his outer life slavishly mirrored his ...
Superworld Comics
US Comics series. Publisher: Hugo Gernsback as Kosmos Publishing. Three bimonthly issues, April to August 1940. / Arguably the first all-sf comic, this was Gernsback's short-lived venture into the comics field, launched soon after the Fiction House title Planet Comics made its debut in January 1940. Regular features with cover billing on all three issues were "Buzz Allen, Invisible Avenger", ...
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 ...