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 ...
War of the Worlds
1. US CBS Radio play (1938). Part of the Mercury Theatre on the Air series of plays, the 30 October 1938 dramatization of H G Wells's War of the Worlds (April-December 1897 Pearson's; 1898) was arguably the most famous broadcast ever made; an adaptation by Howard Koch of the novel, in which the original ...
Donatti, Louis
According to the evidence of his only novel, a Slovenia-born functionary and author (1781-1852) who in 1805 served in a junior position with Sir William Hoste (1780-1828), a fabulously successful naval Captain in the Napoleonic Wars; from 1806-1831 he was with the British Commissariat in Messina, and for some years in the 1830s in Canada as "deputy-assistant-commissary-general", an experience which caused him to suggest that any future Canadian government should be entirely bilingual; he is ...
Byrne, Monica
(1981- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Comedy at Kualoa" in Electric Velocipede #21/#22 for Fall 2010. Her first novel, The Girl in the Road (2014), is largely set in a Near Future some decades hence in which Africa is the newest superpower, India occupies the former superpower role of the faded USA, and a remarkable pontoon bridge known as the Trail ...
Cavendish, Margaret
(1623/1624-1673) UK playwright, poet and author, much of whose life shared the turbulence of her times, who died as Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne. At a time when books by women were mostly pseudonymous or appeared in pirated editions, she was one of the first British women to write and publish professionally under her own name. / Born Margaret Lucas, the youngest child of Royalist and Catholic landholders, she received no formal education but was a lady-in-waiting to Charles I's Queen, ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...