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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 ...
Fahy, Christopher
(1937- ) US author whose first works – like The Compost Heap (1970) – convey in mundane contexts a quiet enragedness that can seem scattershot. After his first story with genre content, "Carnival" for Gallery in August 1980 – assembled with much of his short fiction of fantastic interest in Matinee at the Flame (coll 2006) – most of his later work of interest is Horror, though ...
McCarthy, Wil
Working name of US engineer and author William Terence McCarthy (1966- ) who began publishing sf with "What I Did with the OTV Grissom" for Aboriginal in May/June 1990; his first book appearance was the very thin chapbook Dirtyside Down (1991 chap dos). In his first novel, Aggressor Six (1994), which begins the two-volume Waisters sequence concluding with The Fall of Sirius (1996), ...
Künsken, Derek
(1971- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Tidal Maneuvers" in On Spec for Fall 2006. Most of his later work fits into two connected Hard SF series. The Quantum Universe sequence beginning with The Quantum Magician (January-May 2018 Analog; 2018) follows the life and exploits of a ...
Dirac Communicator
A Imaginary-Science device invented by James Blish for the story "Beep" (February 1954 Galaxy; exp vt The Quincunx of Time 1973), and used by him also in other stories. It is an instantaneous communicator, named after the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984); the Blish story contrasts it with Faster Than Light but non-instantaneous ...
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 ...