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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 ...
Duka, Ivo
Joint pseudonym of émigré Czech authors Ivo Ducháček (1913-1988) – in the Czech Diplomatic Service in exile during World War Two; later an academic – and his wife Helena Koldová (1928-1997), a photographer and video artist. After a short post-war parliamentary career in Czechoslovakia, Ducháček moved to the US after the Communist takeover in 1948. Ducháček was in charge of the Czech broadcasting department of the Voice of ...
Desart, The Earl of
Title of UK author William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe (1845-1898), styled Viscount Castlecuffe until he assumed the earldom at the age of 20 in 1865. He signed all his books "The Earl of Desart"; several of the stories assembled as Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (coll 1887) are sf, at least two of them anticipating with comic apprehension a Near Future in which women are emancipated (his widow became the first woman Senator in the Irish ...
Washington, S H L
(1910-? ) UK author of works of family history whose first publication, on the title page of which he is stated to be thirteen, is The Temple of Mystery: A Tale of Adventure (1924), a Lost Race tale with clear echoes of H Rider Haggard, set in a City occupied by Ancient Egyptians which may contain prehistoric beasts. [JC]
Offutt, Andrew J
(1934-2013) US author who often signed his name andrew j offutt; his first published story was as by Andy Offutt and his first professional sale was as by A J Offutt. Though that first published story, "And Gone Tomorrow" for If in December 1954, was a contest winner, he regarded his professional sf career as beginning with "Blacksword" in Galaxy for December 1959. He soon became a prolific writer in several genres, both under his own name and ...
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 ...