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 ...
Garner, Alan
(1934- ) UK author whose early work was primarily for children; he has lived all his life near Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the setting for nearly all his fiction. Garner is widely thought one of the finest, though most difficult, children's writers of his generation; he ceased publishing for younger audiences after about 1980; after a long hiatus, he published two adult novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), each of them ...
Futurians
An sf group active 1938-1945, significantly located in New York, then and now the publishing centre for American sf. The group was notable for radical politics and the conviction that sf fans should be forward-looking and constructive; the name came from J Michael Rosenblum's UK fanzine, The Futurian. Though deeply involved in Fanzine publishing and internal ...
Birmingham, John
(1964- ) UK-born playwright, journalist and author, in Australia from 1970, where he became active from around 1980, and where he is best-known for the non-fantastic roman à clef, He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (1994); he began to write sf with his Alternate History version of World War Two, the Axis of Time sequence comprising Weapons of Choice ...
Isometric
Term used to describe a form of perspective projection sometimes used in Videogames, particularly in those intended for older hardware, for which it could be technically advantageous. Some mathematical complexities are involved, but in essence an isometric view is one in which the lines of perspective are not linear, as in post-Renaissance European art, but parallel, as in classical Chinese scrolls. Thus objects appear in three dimensions but do not diminish with ...
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 ...