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 ...
Scarborough, Dorothy
(1878-1935) Working name of Emily Dorothy Scarborough, US author best known for her novels about the contemporary American southwest, most notably The Wind (1925), a hauntingly surreal portrait of a woman maddened by listening to the Texas winds. While she edited two volumes of ghost stories (see Eschatology; Supernatural Creatures), Famous Modern Ghost Stories (1921) and ...
Dye, Charles
(1925-1960) US author who served in the US Air Force during World War Two and began publishing sf with "The Last Orbit" in Amazing for February 1950. He was active for less than half a decade, soon publishing his only sf novel, Prisoner in the Skull (1952), in which ordinary Homo sapiens and a form of Superman engage in thriller-like confrontations. After its US publication this ...
Sullivan, Robert
(1953- ) US journalist and author, most of whose work has been nonfiction, much of it associated with Life magazine, where he served as a senior editor for many years. Of sf interest are two spoof "nonfiction" studies, both elaborately arrayed with confabulated documentary evidence about their subject matters. The first, The Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and his Christmas Mission (1996), is constructed in part around a ...
Vanhee, Gregory G
(1936-1992) US author who also wrote the nonfantastic military-action Confirmed Kill series as by Mike Morris. Of sf interest are The Shooter (1988), a Paranoid thriller set in the very Near Future, and Night Strike (1990), a Technothriller involving an advanced fighter plane and the threatened End of the World. [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 ...