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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.
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 ...
Waitman, Katie
Working name of US author Katherine Lura Waitman (1956- ), whose first novel, The Merro Tree (1997), though set in a Space Opera galaxy, intriguingly focuses on the struggle of a performance artist (see Arts) to exercise his high craft freely, and to achieve happiness in a same-sex but inter-species romance (see Sex). Waitman sets the tale in ...
Coetzee, J M
(1940- ) South African author (in Australia from 2002) and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, some of whose work relates to the fantastic. Works clearly standing outside any mimetic tradition include Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), which offers something like a Future War scenario – though one as chillingly abstract as that presented in Dino ...
Microsoft Space Simulator
Videogame (1994). Bruce Artwick Organization (BAO). Designed by Charles Guy. Platforms: DOS. / Microsoft Space Simulator is a Toy Game which simulates historical and technologically extrapolated forms of space exploration, much influenced by the developers' line of flight simulators beginning with Flight Simulator (1979 subLOGIC, AppleII; 1980 TRS80) designed by Bruce Artwick and continuing as the ...
Flying
This entry covers some sf depictions of personal flight using strap-on wings, jet packs and other wearable rather than vehicular devices. For discussion of larger flying machines, see Airships, Balloons, Pax Aeronautica and Transportation. For self-levitation by means of Psi Powers, see ...
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 ...