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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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Cook, Diane
(? - ) US author whose short stories, assembled as Man v. Nature (coll 2014), manifest a twenty-first century sense that Homo sapiens's occupancy of the planet, and of our claims to pre-emptive Identity, are both fragile. The title story, set on a lifeboat in a vast expanse of ocean, follows the three survivors' attempts to make sense of the End of the World by ...
Lee, Yoon Ha
(1979- ) US author whose Korean background is reflected in some of his story-shapes. He began to publish work of genre interest with "The Hundredth Question" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for February 1999, and has published many stories since, in an increasingly wide range of venues; a selection of his best earlier work has been assembled as Conservation of Shadows (coll 2013). His first novel, ...
Ripley, Karen
Pseudonym of US author Mary K Urhausen (1948- ) who began publishing work of genre interest with "In Another Land" for If in 1968 as Mary Urhausen, but whose later work is always signed Karen Ripley. It includes the Prisoner of Dreams sequence comprising Prisoner of Dreams (1989) and The Tenth Class (1991), which features the adventures of a female starship-pilot who must cope with repressive authorities and with ...
Nau, John-Antoine
Pseudonym of US-born poet and author Eugène Léon Édouard Torquet (1860-1918), in France from 1866, his life from this point until his death being unusually peripatetic. His only published novel, La Force Ennemie (1903; trans Michael Shreve as Enemy Force 2010), which won the first Prix Goncourt in 1903, is of sf interest. Embedding its central premise in a jungle-jim of imagery from the surreal edge of Fantastika, ...
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 ...