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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 ...
Angry Red Planet, The
Film (1959; vt Invasion of Mars). American International/Sino Films. Directed by Ib Melchior. Written by Melchior and Sidney W Pink; story by Pink. Cast includes Naura Hayden, Jack Kruschen, Gerald Mohr and Les Tremayne. 83 minutes. Colour. / The first manned expedition to Mars returns to Earth with two crew members dead; a third, Colonel Tom O'Bannion (Mohr) clinging to life while afflicted by a mysterious ailment; and ...
Roth, Philip
(1933-2018) US author, along with Thomas Pynchon the most influential writer of his generation still active well into the twenty-first century; he is probably still best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel whose sophisticated and often comic treatment of the freedoms and imprisonments of Sex is fantastically furthered (see Fabulation) in The Breast (1972), in which a ...
Elements
Although little excitement is now aroused by the addition of yet another short-lived heavy element to the Periodic Table of Physics [see links below], new elements with extraordinary properties used to be highly popular sf devices. Public awareness of radioactivity led to much fictional exploitation of unstable, Ray-emitting nuclides, especially radium itself, and reawakening of interest in the old theme of ...
Burke, Sue
(1955- ) US journalist, editor, translator and author; resident in Spain for at least seventeen years, until 2017. She began publishing work of genre interest with "Poet for Hire" in The Czamina Kid and Other Weird Tales: Mr Mike's First Milwaukee Omnibus (anth 1995) edited by Michael G Corenthal, though she had already worked for some time as a journalist and editor. Her first novel, Semiosis (2018) together with a sequel Interference ...
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 ...