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
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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 ...
Editorial Practices: Checklists
Checklists of published works are a new feature, added in this third edition of the encyclopedia, released online in October 2011. These include bookshop affiliate links, automatically added to italicized book titles by the website software and coloured as links in the ordinary way. All such links go to the encyclopedia's generic shopping page, allowing search of various online bookstores. During the period of our sponsorship by Hachette/Orion/Gollancz such links would connect to the Gollancz ...
Time Paradoxes
The fact that Time Travel into the past disrupts the pattern of causality, changing or cancelling matters of known fact, has not caused stories of this kind to be banished from the sf field; instead it has led to the growth of a subgenre of stories celebrating the peculiar aesthetics of such Paradoxes. The essential paradoxicality of time travel is often dramatized by asking: "What would happen if I went back in time and killed my own ...
I Am Number Four
Film (2011). DreamWorks SKG and Reliance Big Entertainment present a Bay Films production. Directed by D J Caruso. Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and Marti Noxon, based on the novel by Pittacus Lore. Cast includes Dianna Agron, Callan McAuliffe, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer and Alex Pettyfer. 109 minutes. Colour. / Optioned with impetuous haste on the basis of an in-progress draft of the novel and rushed into accelerated production in ...
Barrowcliffe, Mark
(1964- ) UK author who also writes as by Mark Alder and as by M D Lachlan. His early novels, beginning with Girlfriend 44 (2000) and all under his own name, are nonfantastic, though The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing up Strange (2007) is an amusing memoir, focusing on his adolescent obsession with the Role Playing Game Dungeons & Dragons. / Most of Barrowcliffe's pseudonymous ...
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 ...