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 ...
Howes, Margaret
(1927-2008) US sf fan and author of The Wrong World (2000), in which a deracinated young man seeks his father on another planet, which may not be the right world either, and which (see Equipoise) may be a projection. [JC]
Altov, Genrikh
Pseudonym of Russian author and sf critic Genrikh Altshuller (1926-1998); a trained engineer, he registered dozens of patents, and is most widely known for establishing the Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadach (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) or TRIZ. He spent four years in a prison camp for political dissidents after writing a scathing letter to Stalin criticizing the lack of industrial and scientific inventiveness in the USSR. His unpublished "Altov's Register" is a mammoth ...
Cheng Jingbo
(1983- ) Chinese author and editor at Sichuan Children's Publishing House, deputy secretary general of the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. Such hefty connections within the publishing world, however, postdated her rise as an author, which began with "Xiang Pingguo Yiyang de Sikao" ["Thoughts Like an Apple"] (1999 Kehuan Shijie). Nominated for the Yinhe Award and ...
Zhang Ran
(1981- ) Chinese author and former award-winning online news journalist (until 2011) whose rise to fame was coterminous with the push of Chinese authors into Anglophone publishing. For earlier work, as by Zhuxie Duowen, see below. His first work under the Zhang name, the novella "Yitai" ["Ether"] (September 2012 Kehuan Shijie; trans Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu, January 2015 ...
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 ...