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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 ...
Barjavel, René
(1911-1985) French author, active in later life as a screenwriter and journalist. His first novel to be translated, Ravage (1943; trans Damon Knight as Ashes, Ashes 1967), describes a France driven inwards into rural quiescence in 2052 by a great Disaster, as the Sun becomes volatile, causing the sudden disappearance of electricity from the world; the corrupting effects of ...
Star Trek Games
The popularity of Star Trek throughout the 1970s and 1980s led to the creation of a number of games which either had a notable effect on the evolution of their particular form or exerted some influence on the development of the franchise as a whole. Perhaps the most significant were the earliest, the various freely distributed unauthorized Computer Wargames which appeared on academic mainframes during the 1970s, and may have ...
Kantner, Paul
(1941-2016) US musician, best known as one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane. During the 1970s, when his band was in temporary abeyance, Kantner recorded a sf concept album Blows Against the Empire (1970), released as by "Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship" (a usage that predated the formation of the group of that name by four years). The album concerns a group of freedom-fighters (they believe in "free minds, free bodies, free dope, ...
Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
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 ...