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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 ...
Vonarburg, Élisabeth
(1947- ) French-born Canadian teacher, editor, critic and author, in Quebec from 1973, naturalized 1976. She was fiction editor 1979-1990 and editor 1983-1985 of Solaris; and began publishing sf with "Marée haute" for Requiem in 1978; the tale appeared as "High Tide" in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (anth 1979) edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Many of her stories (some ...
Horstman, Thomas
(? - ) US author of a borderline sf tale, The Kessler Alliance (1980), in which a cadre of Nazis hopes to rule the world as Hitler might have (see Hitler Wins for discussion of genuine Alternate Histories on these lines); a sense of Paranoia is duly stirred. [JC]
Binns, Ottwell
(1872-1935) UK Congregational and then Unitarian minister and author, much better known as Ben Bolt, the pseudonym he used from around 1890, for his detective fiction and vigorous adventure tales, though his first novel in book form appeared as late as 1917; he also wrote as by Benjamin Bolt. Dan-Yeo; Or, the Island of the Lost (1929) as Ottwell Binns is a Lost Race tale set on an unknown Island in the South Pacific, ...
Borges, Jorge Luis
(1899-1986) Argentine poet, essayist, librarian and short-story author, a central figure of Latin American literature for the sixty years of his active career, which he pursued solely in Argentina, though he was partly raised in Switzerland and took his university degree there; his influence extended through poetry; very numerous reviews and seminal essays, which covered almost all of Western literature; as well as his fiction. ...
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 ...