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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 ...
Fantastic Voyages
The fantastic voyage is one of the oldest literary forms, the first paradigm instances of its use being the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BCE, and Homer's Odyssey (circa sixth century BCE); it remains one of the basic frameworks for the casting of literary fantasies. Of the prose forms extant before the development of the form of nonfantastic prose fiction that became identified as the novel in the eighteenth century, the ...
Ganthony, Richard
(1856-1924) UK playwright and author of the sf play, A Message from Mars: A Fantastic Comedy in Three Acts (performed 1899), which was first published in novelized form as A Message from Mars: A Story Founded on the Popular Play by Richard Ganthony (1912) by Lester Lurgan, and in something like its original form as A Message from Mars: A Fantastic Comedy in Three Acts (1923 chap), which was a revision of the original script. ...
Randall, Florence Engel
(1917-1997) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "One Long Ribbon" in Fantastic for July 1962; her five novels, beginning with the nonfantastic Hedgerow (1967), were composed for the Young Adult market. They include fantasies like A Place of Sapphires (1969), The Almost Year (1971), and Haldane Station (1973), in all of which Gothic manifestations of the ...
Wolfe, Gene
(1931-2019) US author, born in New York, raised in Texas, long resident in Illinois. He served in the Korean War; his experiences there, which haunted his depictions of War over the decades of his active career, are recorded in the correspondence with his mother between 1952 and 1954 assembled as Letters Home (coll 1991). He graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an editor of a trade ...
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 ...