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 ...
Girls' Last Tour
Japanese animated tv series (2017); original title Shōjo Shūmatsu Ryokō. White Fox. Based on the Manga by Tsukumizu. Directors include Takaharu Ozaki. Writers: Kazuyuki Fudeyasu and Tsukumizu. Voice cast includes Kana Hanazawa, Yurika Kubo and Inori Minase. Twelve (24 minute) episodes. Colour. / A brief flashback conveys that soldiers arriving at their settlement led to "grandfather" persuading sensible ...
Shiel, M P
(1865-1947) Montserrat-born author with his surname given as Shiell, in the UK from around 1883. He began writing fiction in the late 1880s and continued intermittently until his death, his first work of genre interest being "Huguenin's Wife" for Pall Mall Magazine in April 1895; most of his short fiction of fantastic interest was published 1896-1901. Shiel was intensely concerned with style per se, incorporating poetic techniques into narrative ...
Orbit Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, published by Hanro Corp, New York; edited by Jules Saltman. Five issues [Fall] 1953 to November/December 1954, the first two undated. All stories were chosen by Donald A Wollheim, uncredited. Orbit Science Fiction was a middling-quality magazine that fell victim to the inundation of the market with too many sf magazines in the early 1950s. A story in the Tex Harrigan series by August ...
Sargasso Sea
This region in the west of the North Atlantic Ocean, with Bermuda near its western edge, is named for the Sargassum seaweed that grows there and which – along with historical accounts of sailing ships being becalmed there – gave rise to the popular legend of a seaweed-choked Zone of mystery, a mist-shrouded oceanic Lost World of derelict ocean craft, very probably infested with Monsters and ...
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 ...