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 ...
Invisible Man Appears, The
Japanese film (1949). Original title Tōmei Ningen Arawaru. Daiei Film. Directed and written by Nobuo Adachi, based on a story by Akimitsu Takagi. Special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Cast includes Chizuru Kitagawa, Kanji Koshiba, Takiko Mizunoe, Daijirō Natsukawa, Shosaku Sugiyama and Ryūnosuke Tsukigata. 82 minutes, Black and white. / At the Nakazato Chemical Laboratory, Dr Kenzo Nakazato's (Tsukigata) ...
Fisher, Philip M, Jr
(1891-1973) US teacher, naval officer, author and financial auditor (in that order), whose work was restricted primarily to the Pulp magazines. His earliest sale was an article in Youth's Companion in 1916; his first fiction sale, and also his first work of sf, was "The Demise of Professor Manried" for All-Story Weekly, 18 August 1917. Here the eponymous professor is able to use electricity to amplify and harness thought ...
Harris, Raymond
(1953- ) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Broken Worlds (1986), an attractive picaresque adventure. Shadows of the White Sun (1988) seems at first assessment almost too complex – it is set in a Far-Future solar system dominated by revenant star-sailors whose descendants occupy seven Space Habitats called the Hypaethra, orbiting the Sun, while a ...
Carmody, Isobelle
(1958- ) Australian author of sf for adolescents. Her most successful work – the Obernewtyn Chronicles whose first four volumes are Obernewtyn (1987), The Farseekers (1990), Scatterlings (1991) and Ashling (1995) [see Checklist below] – is set in Post-Holocaust venues; the element of sf in these tales becomes steadily less apparent, as the sequence's young ...
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 ...