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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 ...
Thompson, Edward Herbert
(1857-1935) US archaeologist and author, mostly resident in the Yucatan, Mexico, from 1885; he gained some notoriety for an early essay, "Atlantis Not a Myth" (1879 Popular Science Monthly), basing his argument for the historical reality of Atlantis on his conviction that ancient Maya monuments, following a diffusionist model, must have had some such precedent. His many years studying Maya civilization both changed his mind and provided much evidence to the ...
Calverton, V F
Pseudonym of US author George Goetz (1900-1940), who also signed himself more fully Victor Francis Calverton, and who was, as an interbellum American radical and founder of the Modern Quarterly in 1923, a significant contributor to debates on sex, literature and politics; he was notorious for espousing bohemian values; alcoholism killed him young. Among his voluminous writings is an sf novel, ...
Barker, Arthur W
(? -? ) US author of The Light from Sealonia (1927), a Lost World novel set in a deep valley near the North Pole; two opposing civilizations inhabit the cleft, both boasting high Technology, Utopian Sealonia containing fair-skinned abstemious descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Nodolia containing dark-skinned hedonists descended from Cain and his ilk ...
Vizzini, Ned
(1981-2013) US journalist and author born Edward Vizzini (name legally changed) who committed Suicide due to profound clinical depression; much of his nonfiction work, assembled in Teen Angst? Naaah (coll 2000), deals in various ways with the ways this illness afflicts adolescents and young men and women, as does his second novel, the nonfantastic It's Kind of a Funny Story (2006). His first novel, the ...
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 ...