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 ...
de Lint, Charles
(1951- ) Canadian musician and author – born in the Netherlands but in Canada from early infancy – who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Fane of the Gray Rose" in Swords Against Darkness IV (anth 1979) edited by Andrew J Offutt, and who has become one of the most significant, and almost certainly the most prolific, Canadian fantasy authors. In early years he published ...
Kent, Melanie
(? - ) US author of an unremarkable Tie to the Television series Quantum Leap: Quantum Leap XV: Heat Wave (1997). [JC]
Ackerman, Forrest J
(1916-2008) US editor, literary agent and collector, a reader of the sf Magazines from their inception (with a letter published in Science Wonder Quarterly in 1929), an active member of sf Fandom from his early teens; as early as 1932 he served as associate editor of The Time Traveller, often cited as the first Fanzine. Beginning with "A Trip to Mars" (24 May 1941 San Francisco Chronicle), ...
Maeda Kensetsu
Maeda Kensetsu Kōgyō Kabushiki-kaisha ["Maeda Construction and Manufacturing Limited"], a Japanese building and civil engineering company, established in 1919, credited with many large-scale dams, tunnels and railway lines in Japan and other parts of Asia. Notable here for its Fantasy Eigyō-bu ["Fantasy Marketing Department"], a fake division set up as a public relations and recruitment exercise circa 2003, for which the corporation's engineers ...
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 ...