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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Lunan, Duncan
(1945- ) Scottish author, generally of nonfiction books and articles in popular science, with a concentration on space exploration and related topics; titles [for subtitles see Checklist] include Interstellar Contact (1974), Man and the Stars (1974), New Worlds for Old (1979) and Man and the Planets (1983). The second of these presented and supported the hypothesis that historical radio anomalies might best be ...
Cook, Robin
Working name of UK author Robert William Arthur Cook (1931-1994), resident for some years in France (in order, he intimated, to put distance between himself and gangland acquaintances), where he became well-known for noir thrillers written as by Derek Raymond, taking that name perhaps because other Robin Cooks – the author Robin Cook, see entry below, and the British politician Robin Cook (1946-2005) – had effectively taken over his name; he ...
Straus, Ralph
(1882-1950) UK author who also published as by Ralph Strode; his only sf novel, The Dust which Is God: An Undimensional Adventure (1907 chap), confronts a frustrated scientist (see Mad Scientist) whose mentor from another Dimension serves as his Virgilian guide on a tour of various exemplary planets (see Cosmology; Utopia), where he learns that the goal of ...
Gonzales, Tony
(1973- ) US author and games designer working for CCP Games in Reykjavik, Iceland, creators of the EVE Online (2003) multi-player Space Sim game. Having written two on-line novellas using the game's far-future galactic background, Gonzalez made his novel debut with EVE: The Empyrean Age (2008), vigorously deploying many stock sf devices (including ...
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 ...