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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 ...
Whitelaw, David
(1875-1971) UK illustrator, editor, journalist and author, active for many years from about 1890. He wrote a considerable amount of popular fiction, usually thrillers but including much rather good supernatural fiction. He was editor of The London Magazine 1910-1931 and of The Premier Magazine for its entire run, 1914-1931; he published weird fiction and sf in both. The authors he encouraged included Sax Rohmer ...
Haraway, Donna J
(1944- ) US academic, Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her critical works operate at the intersection between science and Feminism. One highly influential and much discussed paper was "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" (1985 Socialist Review #80), exploring ...
Williamson, Michael Z
(1967- ) UK-born soldier (now retired) and author, in Canada then USA from early adulthood, whose first novel, Freehold (2004), initiated the Grainne War sequence which was eventually joined by the Ripple Creek sequence beginning with Better To Beg Forgiveness ... (2007), both series and some shorter works eventually slotted into the Freehold Universe over-series. Williamson adhered subsequently in much of his work to the ...
X Series, The
Videogame series (from 1999). Egosoft. / The X Series is a line of Space Sims, descended from Elite (1984). The player has considerable freedom to explore, trade, mine asteroids, fight pirates (or become one), carry out missions (including bounty-hunting and passenger transport), or create a commercial empire of space-based factories and fleets of starships. The game universe itself is ...
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 ...