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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 ...
Boggon, Martyn
(1934-1997) UK author of some crime fiction and of The Inevitable Hour (1968) in which, after a nuclear Holocaust destroys Chicago and much of the rest of America, a group of survivors in a claustrophobic bomb shelter engage in Post-Holocaust activities which are ultimately criminous. [JC]
Mason, Daniel
(1976- ) US doctor and author who remains best known for his first novel, The Piano Tuner (2002), an ostensibly nonfantastic tale which follows the eponymous expert into the heart of 1886 Burma, where a chthonic myth-fomenting physician's piano must be tuned in order for him to bring harmony to conflicting factions. Analogies with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902) have been noted. Several of the ...
Van Loon, Hendrik Willem
(1882-1944) Dutch-born historian and author, permanently in the US from 1919 when he was naturalized; he is best known for The Story of Mankind (1921), written (unlike H G Wells's almost simultaneous undertaking) primarily for children. His first work of sf interest was "If the Dutch Had Kept Nieuw Amsterdam" (in If It had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History, anth 1931; vt If: or History Rewritten 1931, ed J C ...
McCarthy, T C
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Best Liar Ever" for Bards and Sages Quarterly in July 2010. Germline (2011), which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award, is the first volume of The Subterrene War, Near Future Military SF sequence featuring an unending ...
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 ...