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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 ...
Lang, Fritz
(1890-1976) Austrian film-maker who, after trouble with the Nazis, left Germany for France in 1933 and emigrated to the USA in 1934. He was originally trained as an architect but preferred the graphic arts; during the years before World War One he supported himself as a cartoonist and caricaturist. He turned to writing after being wounded during the conflict, producing several popular thrillers and fantasy romances. After 1918 he entered the German film ...
Kobayashi Yasumi
(1962-2020) Japanese sf, mystery and horror author, who graduated in engineering from Osaka University, and worked in Communications technology at the Sanyō Electronics Institute of New Materials. His debut as an author, "Kangu Shūrisha" ["Toy Repairer"] (April 1995 Yasei Jidai; title story of coll 1999), concerns Faustian pacts with a sinister woman who will fix any toy, and later any child, for a price. With ...
Amis, Martin
(1949-2023) UK journalist and author, son of Kingsley Amis; both father and son, perhaps unusually, achieving a similar eminence in the same field (and both dying at the age of 73); he wrote many reviews as by Henry Tilney. From the first his novels threaten and distress their protagonists – and their readers – with narrative displacements that undermine consensual reality, so that moments of normality in his work are, like as not, intended to ...
Aristide, Oana
(? - ) Romanian economist, hotelier and author, variously resident in Sweden, UK and Greece. Her first novel, Under the Blue (2021), is set initially in a very Near Future England beset by Climate Change and a Pandemic; the protagonist of the tale, in the company of two women, leaves beleaguered rural Devon for Africa, via a depopulated Europe. ...
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 ...