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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 ...
Buckman, H H
(1858-1914) US lawyer, politician and author, remembered for the segregationist Buckman Act of 1905, in terms of which the University of Florida on its founding statutorily excluded both women and persons of colour. In his sf novel, Merope: Or, the Destruction of Atlantis (1898), Atlantis is, as the title claims, destroyed, though only after the Atlanteans have conquered Greece. It is soon learned that the protagonists are avatars of figures from ...
Wells, Angus
(1943-2006) UK author, previously a paperbacks editor, most of whose novels were seventy-five Westerns as by William S Brady, Matthew Kirk, Charles L Pike, James A Muir and J D Sandon, all published from 1975 to 1985; most of his remaining production was fantasy. Under the House Name Richard Kirk, which he shared with Robert P Holdstock, he contributed to the Raven fantasy series ...
Toyota Aritsune
(1938- ) Japanese author and screenwriter, sometimes romanized in error as Aritsune Toyoda, intimately connected to the world of Anime and early Fandom in Japan, both as a participant and chronicler of its history. Toyota initially undertook medical studies on the assumption that he would to take his elder brother's place as the head of the family healthcare business. However, on being released ...
Obruchev, Vladimir A
(1863-1956) Russian geologist, academician and author. Two of his novels, both early classics of Russian sf, have been translated: Plutoniia (1915; 1924; trans B Pearce as Plutonia 1957) and Zemlya Sannikova (1926; trans David Skvirsky as Sannikov Land 1955). Both are adventures after the style of Jules Verne, aimed at younger readers, and informatively crammed with geological and palaeontological data. The ...
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 ...