SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Wormholes
Item of sf Terminology borrowed from speculative Physics; the term was coined in 1957 by the physicist John A Wheeler (1911-2008) to describe a hypothetical short-cut through space/time corresponding very roughly to the beloved sf concept of Hyperspace. Wormholes may be associated with Black Holes (another Wheeler coinage) and their once-fashionable but probably ...
Caine, William
(1873-1923) UK author, almost invariably of spoofish light fiction and plays. Of greatest sf interest is The Confectioners (1906) with John Fairbairn, set in a UK transformed by the near-future Invention of a substance capable of taking any shape and function, and by the unrest this substance causes when an unscrupulous industrial magnate tries to corner its use. The narrative is conveyed with lame wit and nonsense – Caine is a poor third behind ...
Vallance, Karl
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of Global Blackout (1954), a Near Future Disaster tale in which the world is suddenly blacked out. The cause is unknown. The protagonists of the tale survive social breakdown. [JC]
Busch, Niven
(1903-1991) US screenwriter and author, active in Hollywood from the early 1930s and best known as a writer for the effectively erotized, soon-filmed Western Duel in the Sun (1944); he is of sf interest for The Titan Game (1989), a Technothriller set in the very Near Future; the tale's protagonist, unwilling inheritor of his father's Weapons ...
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 ...