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 ...
Sphere
Film (1998). Warner Bros presents a Baltimore Pictures and Constant c production in association with Punch Productions. Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Paul Attanasio, Stephen Hauser and Kurt Wimmer, based on the novel Sphere (1987) by Michael Crichton. Cast includes Peter Coyote, Marga Gómez, Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L Jackson, Queen Latifah, Liev Schreiber and Sharon Stone. 134 minutes. Colour. / ...
Sweet, Darrell
(1934-2011) American artist, who came to prefer being credited as Darrell K Sweet. As a young adult, Sweet earned a BFA in painting from Syracuse University in 1956 and also served in the military. After working as a freelance artist, including assignments for Reader's Digest, Sweet began painting sf book covers for Ballantine Books in 1974, later shifting to its subsidiary Del Rey Books. From the start, Sweet ...
Lambert, Joan Dahr
(? - ) US author of the Young Adult novel, Circles of Stone (1997), which is Prehistoric SF, one of its serial protagonists (all of them healers named Zena) living over a million years ago in the Great Rift Valley in Africa (see Origin of Man); the second Zena, similarly empowered and forthright, lives a quarter of a million years ago; the ...
Friswell, Hain
(1825-1878) UK journalist and author, active from about 1851 in several genres. Blackwood's Comic Zadkiel: An Almanac at Once Prophetical and Profitable [for full title see Checklist] (coll 1855) is a spoof almanac in which the Predictions of its presenter/protagonist Zadkiel are dramatized, sometimes in sf form, including "'Grand Nephew Tom's Cabin,' An Extract From a Sequel Some Sixty Years After the Date of Mrs. Stowe's Volume", a ...
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 ...