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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 ...
California
It is easy to concur with the adage that California was not so much discovered as invented: that California is, therefore, pure sf. A rhetorically and pragmatically attractive underlying premise of this sort arguably infuses central anatomies of the state like Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and elsewhere. Certainly, with the possible exception of the legend of El Dorado, there is little before 1800 that ...
Neutron Stars
Item of Terminology in Astronomy, and much used in sf. In an ordinary star, such as the Sun, the gravitational pressure tending to make it collapse is balanced by the outward pressure created by the continuous nuclear fusion within it. As a star's fuel burns out, Gravity takes over. A star of mass less than the Chandrasekhar limit – a value calculated by Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ...
Grey, Edward
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? - ) of Concealed for Thirty Years: Being the Narrative of One E Grey (1890), a Lost Race novel set on an Island in the Pacific, where a culture of English colonists has survived since the Middle Ages. [JC]
Hogan, James P
(1941-2010) UK-born systems-design engineer and author, in the USA from 1977 and latterly in Ireland; he was a full-time author from 1979. His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the sf imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment/Giants sequence, being followed ...
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 ...