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.
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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 ...
Dickens, Charles
(1812-1870) UK editor and author, almost certainly the greatest novelist in the English language. Dickens wrote considerable fantasy, including most famously A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843) which, though not exactly a Club Story, is notable for an implied frame narrator who seems to be telling us the tale aloud, as though he were incanting a mini-saga [for Christmas Books see The ...
Doroga k Zvezdam
Russian documentary film (1957; vt Road to the Stars). Leningrad Popular Science Film Studio. Directed by Pavel Klushantsev. Written by Boris Lyapunov and Vasili Solovyov. Cast includes Georgi Solovyov and other unidentified actors. 52 minutes. Colour. / This documentary begins with an extended look at the life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Solovyov), explaining how this visionary Scientist first devised ...
Science and Invention
US monthly letter-size popular-science magazine, Slick paper; 220 issues May 1913 to August 1931. It began as The Electrical Experimenter and changed title to Science and Invention in August 1920. Published 1913-1929 by Experimenter Publishing, under Hugo Gernsback until his bankruptcy in 1929, thereafter published by Radio-Science Publications. Although Gernsback was overall editor-in-chief, the hands-on editor was H ...
Dinosaurs
Our cultural fascination with the great lizards of prehuman Earth has inevitably led to much sf in which – as never in history – humans encounter living dinosaurs. This may take place in Prehistoric SF set in an anachronistic deep past, as in In the Morning of Time (coll of linked stories 1919) by Charles G D Roberts. A modern enclave of surviving dinosaurs is somewhat less risible. This ...
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 ...