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
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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 ...
Cinema
The basis on which films and film-makers have been selected for inclusion in this volume is discussed in the Introduction to the Second Book Edition. / From the outset, the cinema specialized in illusion to a degree that had been impossible on the stage. Sf itself takes as its subject matter that which does not exist, now, in the real world (though it might one day), so it has a natural affinity with the cinema: the illusory ...
Gibbins, David
(1962- ) Canadian archaeologist and author, partly resident in the UK, of whose novels Atlantis (2005) is of sf interest, as the rediscovered Atlantis proves to contain secrets of ancient science of planetary importance, and likely to cause a Holocaust, a threat dealt with in The Last Gospel (2008) and The Gods of Atlantis (2011). Crusader Gold (2006), a ...
Russell, Ray
(1924-1999) US author, editor and screenwriter whose work (although he wrote several stories for the SF Magazines) was mostly horror, supernatural, Fantasy and Gothic fiction for the Slicks. His first published story was "The Lesser Sin" (1953 Esquire) and his best-known is "Sardonicus" (January 1961 Playboy), assembled with other novellas as ...
Cohen, Jack
(1933-2019) UK reproductive biologist, formerly with the University of Warwick, and author of several nonfiction books in which the relationship between speculative fiction and the speculative sciences are explored, all written in collaboration with Ian Stewart. The first of these is The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994). Of particular sf interest is the their exploration of possible ...
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 ...