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.
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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 ...
N3F
The National Fantasy Fan Federation, formed in the USA in 1941; this was the brain-child of Damon Knight, who called for it in a Fanzine article titled "Unite – or Fie!" (October 1940 Fanfare ed Art Widner). After a succession of short-lived and factional US fan associations in the 1930s, the N3F proved a stable and enduring national organization. However, despite its long existence, it has maintained a relatively low ...
Wicks, Mark
(? -? ) UK author whose To Mars Via the Moon: An Astronomical Story (1911) recounts the construction of a Spaceship capable of taking its bereaved solitary builder first to the Moon and then to Mars, which is described in accordance with the theories of Percival Lowell; here he finds a Utopia, and the ...
Minto, William
(1845-1893) Scottish philosopher, academic, journalist and author whose sf novel, The Crack of Doom: A Novel (August 1885-June 1886 Blackwood's Magazine; 1886 3vols), portentously invokes the Disaster threatened by an approaching Comet to shape, intermittently, an otherwise prosaic (and conspicuously dithery) plot; in the event, the End of the World is averted. This novel should ...
Gollancz
UK publishing house, for many years properly styled Victor Gollancz Ltd, famous (until its sale to the US company Houghton Mifflin in 1990) as one of the last family companies in UK publishing; in 1992 Houghton Mifflin sold the firm to the Cassell group of companies, where it became an imprint; in December 1998 it was acquired by Orion, itself newly purchased by Hachette, and Victor Gollancz soon became Orion's imprint for all sf, fantasy and horror, excepting only some children's genre titles ...
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 ...