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: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
McKillip, Patricia A
(1948-2022) US author whose early books were all fantasy, mostly for children. These showed an increasing assurance (and appeared to be for increasingly older children) from The House on Parchment Street (1973) through to The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (1973 chap; exp as coll with "The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath" [in Elsewhere 2, anth 1982, ed Terri Windling and Mark Allan Arnold] 1984) and ...
Barker, Arthur W
(? -? ) US author of The Light from Sealonia (1927), a Lost World novel set in a deep valley near the North Pole; two opposing civilizations inhabit the cleft, both boasting high Technology, Utopian Sealonia containing fair-skinned abstemious descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Nodolia containing dark-skinned hedonists descended from Cain and his ilk ...
Palumbo, David
(1982- ) American artist, son of artist Julie Bell and sf scholar Donald E Palumbo, and brother of artist Anthony Palumbo. He received formal training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 2000 to 2004 and was informally mentored by his mother and his stepfather Boris Vallejo. He then became active in a number of areas, including exhibitions of his fine art, ...
Irwin, Robert
(1946-2024) UK academic, mediaevalist, professional juggler (briefly) and author whose work in Arabian studies, of importance in itself, underpins the world envisioned in his first and most famous novel, The Arabian Nightmare (1983; rev 1987), which may be the definitive rendering of its central conceit: a mise en abyme-like dream narrative whose protagonist, upon seeming to awaken, only finds himself passing out of one story through a Portal into a deeper dream [for ...
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 ...