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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 ...
Hershman, Morris
(1926- ) US author whose sf novel, Shareworld (1972; vt The Crash of 2086 1976), takes a Dystopian view of the stock market dominating the entire world and anticipates a final and definitive Crash. [JC]
Absent Minded Professor, The
Film (1961). Walt Disney (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by Robert Stevenson. Written by Bill Walsh. Cast includes Fred MacMurray, Nancy Olson and Keenan Wynn. 97 minutes. Black and white. / Historically important as the financially successful template for a great many lightweight, comparatively low-budget sf comedies from the Disney studio, though it was not their first live-action fantasy comedy – that had been ...
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 ...
McBratney, Sam
(1943- ) UK author of The Final Correction (1978), a compact, acerbic sf novel set on a colony planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) which effectively serves as a Prison for delinquents from Earth, each denizen subjected to a daily Memory Edit; the tale, ostensibly told in Young Adult terms, subjects its ...
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 ...