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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.
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 ...
Something Is Out There
1. Film (1977); vt of The Day of the Animals. / 2. US/Australian tv miniseries (1988). CPT Holdings/Hoyts for NBC. Executive producers Frank Lupo, John Ashley. Directed by Richard Colla. Written Lupo. Cast includes Joe Cortese, Maryam d'Abo and George Dzundza. Two 100-minute episodes. / This sometimes exciting, often threadbare policier pits a tough Earth cop (Cortese) and a marooned, ...
Club Story
1. Assemblages of tales told within an enabling frame-story to a group of companions in a sheltered venue were not always known as club stories, a term of nineteenth-century provenance that does not, perhaps, very adequately encompass (for instance) the implications of Odysseus's narrating most of the events of The Odyssey (circa 700 BCE) (see Homer) over dinner, or of the Decameron (finished circa 1372) by Giovanni Boccaccio ...
Patneaude, David
(1944- ) US author of Young Adult tales, whose Dark Starry Morning: Stories of This World and Beyond (coll 1996) contains both fantasy and sf; Epitaph Road (2010), set in the distant Near Future – sometime after a Pandemic in 2067 has eliminated almost all males (see Disaster) – interestingly explores ...
Kahn, Herman
(1922-1983) American mathematician, political scientist and high-profile practitioner of Futures Studies. He worked 1947-1959 with the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation, and was subsequently director of the Hudson Institute, a body devoted to forecasting, and producing political, economic and military scenarios of the future. In his day Kahn was one of the most influential and best-known workers in this area, though many argued that the kind of ...
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 ...