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: Handheld Press
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 ...
Williams, Emlyn
(1905-1987) Welsh actor, playwright and author, his first plays being performed as early as 1922; several of them have mild inclinations to the supernatural. Headlong (1980), which was filmed as King Ralph (1991) directed by David S Ward, is an Alternate History tale in which an American, Ralph Jones, suddenly succeeds to the British throne after the entire royal family has died in an accident. The story diverges significantly ...
West, Jessamyn
(1902-1984) US author active from the 1930s, most famous for the tales of rural Quakerism assembled in The Friendly Persuasion (coll of linked stories 1945). She is of sf interest for two novellas. "The Pismire Plan" (in Cross Section 1948: A Collection of New American Writing, anth 1948, edited by Edwin Seaver [1900-1987]) is a spoofish but ultimately serious Satire set in a Near Future ...
Hunter, Justin
(? - ) UK author of a Tie to the Warhammer universe (see Warhammer 40,000), Windhammer: Forged in Battle (2004), in which a small untried military unit gets tried by a force of "goblins" and other inimicals. [JC]
Strugatski, Arkady and Boris
(1925-1991) and (1933-2012) respectively; Russian authors. Before they began to collaborate in the early 1950s, Arkady studied English and Japanese, and worked as a technical translator and editor, and Boris was a computer mathematician at Pulkovo astronomical observatory. The brothers' first books made up the Noon Universe interplanetary cycle: Strana bagrovykh tuch ["The Country of Crimson Clouds"] (1959); Shest' spichek ["Six Matches"] (coll 1960); ...
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 ...