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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.
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 ...
Benson, Gordon, Jr
(1936-1996) US bookseller, publisher and bibliographer who released the first of his many solo Bibliographies of sf figures in approximately 1980; early bibliographies such as that of Jack Williamson (?1980 chap) were privately published from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with no designated publisher imprint. In 1983 he moved into partnership with UK bibliographer Phil ...
Matiasz, G A
(1952- ) US journalist and author, active in the former capacity from the 1970s, best known for his column as by Lefty Hooligan in Maximum Rocknroll from 1992 to 2020. His first novel, End Time: Notes on the Apocalypse (1994), is set in a Near Future world dominated by an America in thrall to its corporations and attempting to crush revolts across the planet; a group of antiwar students, in possession of a secret ...
Waberi, Abdourahman A
(1965- ) Djiboutian journalist and author, mostly in France from around 1985; Le Pays sans ombre (coll 1994; trans Jeanne Garane as The Land Without Shadows 2005) assembles nonfantastic stories set in his native land. He is of sf interest for Aux États-Unis d'Afrique: Roman (2006; trans David and Nicole Ball as In the United States of Africa 2009), an Alternate World tale ...
Richards, Lysander Salmon
(1835-1926) US author of Breaking Up; Or, the Birth, Development, and Death of the Earth and its Satellite in Story (1896), a title evoking the cosmological perspectives of an author like the then popular Camille Flammarion, and the epic history being unpacked is intermittently "narratized", to give sentient interest, the viewpoint character being a dead but observant Alien from another star who tracks the ...
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 ...