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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 ...
Whitman, John Pratt
(1871-1963) US artist, playwright and author, perhaps best known for The Sympathy of the People: A Drama of Today (1920), a nonfantastic advocacy of labour reform based on the Boston police strike of 1919. Utopia Dawns (coll 1934) contains essays on Utopias, including texts by Sir Thomas More, William Morris, H G Wells and others; an ...
Sinderby, Donald
Pseudonym of UK author Donald Ryder Stephens (1898-1983), in active service during World War One. The last of his five novels, Mother-in-Law India (1930), is a Near Future tale in which the British Empire threatens to crack apart due to Britain's socialist government's foolish promise to give India her freedom (see Imperialism; Politics), opening the ...
Jerry Cornelius [series]
A loosely linked sequence by Michael Moorcock (whom see for fuller discussion), beginning in the mid-1960s in New Worlds and central to that magazine's then Entropy-permeated world view. Jerry Cornelius, introduced in "Preliminary Data" (August 1965 New Worlds), was at first a semi-parodic Icon of contemporary "Swinging ...
Knobel, Philip
(1929-1982) US author known only for Mr Moon (1979), a tale of First Contact in which an Alien visits Earth. [JC]
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 ...