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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 ...
Blumberg, Rhoda
(1917-2016) US author of some 25 books of historical nonfiction written for children [not listed below]. Her most notable venture into "non-fact" speculation is the lighthearted The First Travel Guide to the Moon: What to Pack, How to Go, and What to See When You Get There (1980 chap), which assumes commercial Space Flight and space tourism from 1995 onward and is written as though for early twenty-first-century readers planning a vacation on the ...
Blaster
In sf Terminology, the handgun that blasts had an early place of honour along with the Death Ray, Disintegrator and other generic Ray Guns. Blasters were standard-issue Weapons in early Space Opera, filling the role of six-guns in Westerns. The term seems to have been introduced ...
Yamamoto Hiroshi
(1956-2024) Japanese author whose influence extends not only through his own published works, but also through his connections, known, unknown and suspected, with several lobbies and factions within Japanese Fandom, including the game designers Group SNE and the Togakkai collaborative book mill, the latter largely devoted to nonfiction works celebrating and debunking Pseudoscience and the occult, not ...
Rossow, William B
(1947- ) US climatologist with NASA and author, with Marjorie Bradley Kellogg (whom see for details) of the Lear's Daughter sequence of sf novels, which have much to do with violent spasms of weather on an alien planet visited by inept human Scientists and less inept human planet-developers. [JC]
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 ...