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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Addison, Joseph
(? - ) Scottish-born author resident in Canada whose only novel, Tesseract (1988), perhaps over-complexly explores various dimensions in Time and space, the eponymous AI serving to help the protagonist of the tale decide which Alternate World available to him will offer a chance for Homo sapiens (plus another race) to avoid mortal ...
Schenck, Hilbert
(1926-2013) US engineer, university lecturer and author who published his first sf story, "Tomorrow's Weather" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1953, long before he became seriously (though briefly) involved in fiction; much of his nonfiction of the 1950s and 1960s dealt lovingly with the ocean and with oceanological research and exploration technologies. His first two novels are both set in the ocean-girt Cape Cod region of New England, ...
Land of the Giants
US tv series (1968-1970). An Irwin Allen Production for Twentieth Century Fox TV/ABC. Created by Irwin Allen, also executive producer. Writers included Bob and Esther Mitchell, Bob and Wanda Duncan, Richard Shapiro, Dan Ullman, William Welch. Directors included Harry Harris, Nathan Juran, Sobey Martin, Irwin Allen (1st episode only). Regular cast Gary Conway, Kurt Kasznar, Don Marshall, Heather Young, Don Matheson, Deanna Lund, Stefan Arngrim. Special ...
Jonson, Ben
(1572-1637) UK poet, actor and playwright, after Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and William Shakespeare the pre-eminent dramatist of his era, active from the late 1590s till the year of his death. He was most famous for his astute and often highly satirical comedies, most notably Volpone (1605-1606), The Alchemist (1610) which satirized the gullibility of a public ready to accept any pseudoscientific nostrum, and ...
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 ...