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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 ...
Stillman, Ron
Pseudonym of US author Don Bendell (1947- ), of the Tracker Military-SF series starring a USAF pilot and genius whose inventions make his blindness irrelevant; the stories are told in a maliciously exaggerated Parody of the conventions of this sort of fiction. The sequence so far comprises Tracker (1990), Green Lightning (1990), Blood Money (1991), ...
Bickley, Gillian
(1943- ) UK-born academic and poet, mostly resident in Hong Kong from 1972; she has published essays on Future War texts, and in Hong Kong Invaded! A '97 Nightmare (coll 2001) she surrounds the anonymous Future War novella, The Back Door (1897 The China Mail: 1897 chap), with an extensive explanatory apparatus; the invaders are France allied with Russia. They succeed. ...
Molesworth, Vol
(1924-1964) Australian journalist and author, active in Fandom around the period of World War Two. His sf included two series: the Ape of God sequence, comprising Ape of God (1943 chap) and Monster at Large (1943 chap), which retells Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in an Australian setting (see also Frankenstein Monster); plus ...
Perce, Elbert
(1831-1869) US translator and author whose Proto SF novel, Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages; Being an Account of his Marvelous Adventures in Kailoo, Hydrogenia and Ejario (1851), intriguingly utilizes the convention of the Fantastic Voyage to shift his tale back and forth among several narrative categories: genuinely speculative sf; mild-mannered Bildungsroman leading to marriage; interplanetary romance; the ...
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 ...