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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 ...
Disintegrator
In sf Terminology, one of the commonest of hand-held Weapons (see Rays), especially in Space Opera of the 1930s and 1940s. The device may have been a product of squeamishness – or perhaps just neatness – since it creates a maximum of destruction with a minimum of bleeding pieces left to sweep up afterwards. The term seems to have been introduced by Nictzin ...
Felice, Cynthia
(1942- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Longshanks" for Galileo #2 in 1976. Her first novel, Godsfire (1978), depicts an Alien planet inhabited by felines who dominate the local humans but who have never seen their sun because of the unending rain. Almost too well constructed – almost facile in its zestful plotting – the book demonstrated Felice's technical skill, her romantic ...
Stratemeyer, Edward
(1862-1930) US dime-novel entrepreneur (see Dime-Novel SF), a mass producer of boys' books who reportedly wrote 160 solo works, beginning with "Walter Drumm's Heroism" (1889 Young American), along with Dime Novels for Street and Smith as by Horatio Alger (1832-1899) after his death, Jim Bowie and Nick Carter; until coming to some kind of rest – it becomes hard to work out what he ...
Swenson, Patrick
(1958- ) US editor, publisher and author, founder of Fairwood Press in 2000, which he continues to run and for which he designed many covers. Somewhat earlier in 1995 he founded and edited the magazine Talebones, which latterly operated through Fairwood. Swenson began to publish work of genre interest with "The Siren" in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine for April 1990. His Union of Worlds sequence of interstellar ...
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 ...