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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 ...
Hall, Hal
Working name of US author Harold Curtis Hall (1911-1992), not to be confused with Hal W Hall; his Future War novel, The Great Conflict (1942) is faintly inspired by World War Two. [JC]
Pirandello, Luigi
(1867-1936) Italian playwright and author whose prolific career began with poetry – Mal Giocondo ["Unhappy Joy"] (coll 1889) – and continued with a large amount of short fiction, beginning with Amori senza Amore (coll 1894). Many of his circa 400 stories and sketches, many of them Contes-Cruels [for this term, plus entry on Pirandello with fantasy linkings, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under ...
Game-Worlds
Although this term may be applied to imaginary worlds governed by the rules of ancient games like Chess, this encyclopedia chiefly applies it to worlds designed by the manufacturers of Games – almost always Role Playing Games (or Gamebooks) or computer Adventure games (see Videogame). In the case of RPGs the ...
Griffin, Sarah Maria
(?1988- ) Irish author whose first novel, the Near Future Young Adult Dystopian Space and Found Parts (2016), is set in a transfigured Dublin, which has been turned into an oppressive Keep by the survivors of a great Disaster a century before. Now known as the Pasture, the diminished ...
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 ...