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 ...
Multiverse
Term originally coined outside sf as an alternative to "universe" that supposedly avoided any presupposition of a unique and ordered creation. Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (coll 1897): "Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe." This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William ...
Verhoeven, Paul
(1938- ) Dutch filmmaker whose long career began in 1960 when he was still a student in Leiden, where he studied to Master's level in mathematics and physics. He refined his craft through the sixties, particularly in a documentary produced during his national service and on the iconic Dutch television series Floris (1968), where he made a star of the young Rutger Hauer. In the seventies he emerged as a major, if notorious, director of provocative ...
Olson, John B
(? - ) US author of the Oxygen sequence of sf novels with Randall Ingermanson, who see for details. [JC]
Cover, Arthur Byron
(1950- ) US author. He was involved in the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in 1971-1972, and began publishing sf with "Gee, Isn't He the Cutest Little Thing?" in Alien Condition (anth 1973) edited by Stephen Goldin. His first novel, Autumn Angels (1975), the first of the very loose Autumn Angels sequence, with introduction by ...
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 ...