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 ...
Geen, Emma
(? - ) UK author of a Young Adult sf novel, The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016), which is set mostly in not much modified Near Future Bristol, a futurity signalled by data-filled eyeglasses and the near disappearance of otters (in 2016 a resurgent species). The main innovation is the Invention of long-distance ...
Kepler, Johannes
(1571-1630) German astronomer, one-time assistant to Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and later imperial mathematician and astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. Kepler's contribution to Astronomy – most notably his three laws of planetary motion – provided vital groundwork for Newton's cosmological synthesis. In 1593 he prepared a dissertation on the heliocentric theory, which explained how events in the heavens would be ...
Southern, Terry
(1924-1995) US journalist, screenwriter and author, of greatest sf interest for his brief but seminal involvement (16 November-28 December 1962) in the transformation of Peter George's original novel, Two Hours to Doom (1958) as by Peter Bryant, into the black Satire Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) directed (and in part written) by ...
Pynchon, Thomas
(1937- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" in Epoch Magazine for Spring 1959; all of his works are Fabulations in that most of them resemble sf under some interpretations (see also Fantastika), and Against the Day (2006) is undoubtedly sf. Though the Paranoia-wracked worlds his protagonists inhabit may ...
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 ...