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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 ...
Jin Yong
Writing name of Zha Liangyong GBM, OBE (1924-2018), also known as Louis Cha, a Chinese newspaper publisher, editor and author, particularly in the Wuxia tradition of heroic martial-arts fiction. A graduate from Soochow University in international law, he was posted to Hong Kong to set up a branch of the Shanghai newspaper Ta Kung Pao in 1947. Zha became a permanent resident of the city, moonlighting as a novelist with ...
Hatfield, Richard
(1853-? ) US author of a Lost Race tale, Geyserland: Empiricisms in Social Reform: Being Data and Observations Recorded by the Late Mark Stubble, MD, PhD: (A Tentative Edition) (1908), which – via a seventeenth-century manuscript by Adam Mann [sic] discovered by the late Mark Stubble and conveyed to Hatfield – argues for a shifting of Earth's axis in 9262 BCE, which dooms various species to extinction, and traps ...
Travis, John
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Splintered Forest" in Phantoms for March 1997, assembled with other short fiction in Mostly Monochrome Stories (coll 2009), a title belied by the author's vivid mixing of genres and tonalities (see Horror in SF). He is of sf interest specifically for the patently Equipoisal Benji Spriteman ...
Tucker, Horace
(1849-1911) UK-born minister and author, in Australia from 1861, whose marginally-sf Utopia, The New Arcadia: An Australian Story (1894), was based on the real-life Tucker Village Settlements, which he had co-founded and which existed from 1892 to 1894. The practical impediments to success in the real settlements are melodramatized in the novel, where modestly advanced Technology and Christian ordinances are nullified by a ...
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 ...