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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 ...
Lesson, The
Armenia animated film (1987). Armenfilm. Directed and written by Robert Sahakyants. 17 minutes. Colour. / The first passenger-carrying starship (see Spaceships) lands on a planet whose flora and fauna mostly resemble portmanteaus of Earth species (see Life on Other Worlds). The trigger-happy tourists begin hunting them, only to find the dead ...
Hathway, Alan
(1906-1977) Author, presumably US, known only for his four 1941 contributions to the Doc Savage universe, all under the usual House Name for that series: Kenneth Robeson. These began with "The Devil's Playground" (January 1941 Doc Savage; 1970). The remaining episodes – "The Rustling Death" (May 1941 ...
Archer, Jeffrey
(1940- ) UK Conservative politician and author of many thrillers, most notorious in the early twenty-first century for his imprisonment on a count of perjury; in his Near Future sf novel, Shall We Tell the President? (1977; rev 1985), the American president who may or may not be informed of a plot against his life is Edward Kennedy, whose gun control laws are opposed vehemently. The revised edition is transformed into a ...
Music
This article deals with music as it is portrayed and speculated about in sf. For discussion of actual music with sf themes, see SF Music. / Of the Arts, music is the one most commonly featured in sf – albeit not quite to the extent that Fantasy is pervaded by it. Several sf writers studied it, notably including Lloyd Biggle Jr (PhD in musicology), Langdon ...
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 ...