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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 ...
Sentinel, The
Videogame (1986; vt The Sentry in the US). Designed by Geoff Crammond. Platforms: C64 (1986); Amstrad, AtariST, BBCMicro, Spectrum (1987); Amiga (1988), DOS (1989). / In The Sentinel, topography is everything. The player adopts the role of a "synthoid", a Robot in a three-dimensional chequerboard landscape overlooked by its eponymous guardian. The Sentinel's gaze slowly scans across ...
Radin, Max
(1880-1950) Polish-born academic and author, in US from early childhood; of sf interest is The Day of Reckoning (1943), a Near Future tale in which the Nazis have lost World War Two and Hitler (along with his main subordinates) are put on trial for war crimes. Though roughly similar to Michael Foot's The Trial of Mussolini (1943), Radin's book focuses more strongly on ...
Hersey, Harold
(1893-1956) US editor, publisher, short-story author and poet. A man of great energy and relatively little talent, Hersey edited such sf Pulp magazines as Thrill Book, Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories and Mystery Adventures, though most of his editorial work was not sf-related. His early writing, all negligible, appeared under various pseudonyms; but Night (coll ...
Oni
Videogame (2001). Bungie Studios. Platforms: Mac, PS2, Win. / Oni is a third person fighting game (see Videogames) with the narrative structure and world design of a linearly plotted First Person Shooter. This unique combination of forms works well in principle, but the game's urban environments, based on real-world architecture, seem overly repetitive and are arguably poorly ...
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 ...