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 ...
Tops in Science Fiction
US reprint magazine. Two issues, Spring 1953 (standard Pulp size) and Fall 1953 (Digest size). Published by Love Romances, New York; edited by Jack O'Sullivan (#1) and Malcolm Reiss (#2). Tops in Science Fiction featured stories which had first appeared in Planet Stories. Contributors included such Planet Stories regulars as Leigh Brackett and Ray ...
Swanwick, Michael
(1950- ) US author who began to publish sf with "The Feast of St Janis" for New Dimensions 11 (anth 1980) edited by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg, and who became known, very rapidly, as an author of intensely crafted, complex tales whose multiple layering allows his conventional sf plots and venues to be understood as exercises in mythopoesis, somewhat after the manner of Gene ...
Bug
Film (1975). Paramount. Directed Jeannot Szwarc. Written by William Castle (also produced), Thomas Page, based on The Hephaestus Plague (1973) by Page. Cast includes Bradford Dillman, Richard Gilliland and Joanna Miles. 100 minutes. Colour. / After an earthquake near a small US town, strange insects appear out of a fissure. Capable of producing fire by rubbing their rear appendages together, they ignite countryside, cars, people and a ...
Bennett, Robert Jackson
(1984- ) US author whose first novel, Mr Shivers (2010), a supernatural thriller, plunges into what would become his dominant focus of interest: the Matter of America. In this tale, a man whose child has been murdered becomes a hobo in order to track down the eponymous creature responsible for this and other similar deaths, riding the rails of 1930s America in his quest for "justice" (see Crime and Punishment); ...
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 ...