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
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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 ...
Hader, Elmer
(1889-1973) US illustrator and author, whose copious work, in collaboration with his wife, includes one Young Adult sf tale, The Skyrocket (1946) with Berta Hader, though it may be the case that the rocket in question is fuelled by magic. [JC]
Entropy
In its strict meaning, "entropy" is a thermodynamics term, first used by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) in 1850 to describe the amount of heat that must be put into a closed system to bring it to a given state. The Second Law of Thermodynamics – often stated in terms of work as "it is impossible to produce work by transferring heat from a cold body to a hot body in any self-sustaining process" – can alternatively be rendered: "Entropy always increases in any closed ...
Sur un air de Charleston
Film (1927 France; vt Charleston Parade). Produced and directed by Jean Renoir (1894-1979). Written by Pierre Lestringuez from an idea by André Cerf. Cast includes Catherine Hessling and Johnny Hudgins. 20 minutes. Black and white. / This incomplete film is Renoir's only venture into science fiction. Set in the year 2028, it involves an African explorer (Hudgins) travelling to a devastated post-War Europe in a globular ...
He, Joan
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult Descendant of the Crane (2019), is fantasy. Her second novel, The Ones We're Meant to Find (2021), which is set in a world disrupted by Climate Change, follows the travels of two separated sisters (one of them the narrator) searching for one another in the midst of the Disaster, a ...
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 ...