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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 ...
Smith, L Neil
(1946-2021) US author, ex-police reserve officer, gunsmith and former state candidate for the US Libertarian Party, who began publishing sf with "Grimm's Law" for Stellar 5 (anth 1980) edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey. He remains best known for the North American Confederacy sequence, set in a parallel universe (see Parallel Worlds) in which a libertarian version of ...
Infodump
An item of sf Terminology commonly used to designate chunks of technical discourse inserted into fictional texts, usually texts described as Hard SF, which are based (or claim to be based) on non-fantasized understandings of Technology and science. It is therefore often safe to assume that the infodump itself, certainly in the hard sf context, is a condensation of non-fantasized knowledge, and that it is ...
Kanbayashi Chōhei
Writing name of Japanese author Kiyoshi Takayanagi (1953- ), occasionally romanized as Chōhei Kambayashi, whose tone swings largely between Cyberpunk of conflicts with machines, and Satire involving cats. He has won the prestigious Seiun Award on multiple occasions, for works in both modes. / Ever since his competition-winning debut short "Kitsune ...
Miyazawa Kenji
(1896-1933) Japanese poet and author, overlooked in his lifetime but posthumously emblematic of Fantastika in Japan's long 1920s, and cherished as a pacifist, internationalist thinker of the pre-war period. Graduating from Morioka Agriculture and Forestry College in 1918, Miyazawa was an early supporter of organic foods and fertilizers, a strict vegetarian, and after 1926 an ardent proponent of Esperanto, into which he translated some of ...
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 ...