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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 ...
Meginnis, Mike
(? - ) US author whose two novels interweave sf motifs and topoi and Tall-Tale confabulation into renderings of twenty-first century Fantastika at perhaps its most effective: abrupt clashing recognitions of the world being a central characteristic of this broad category of fiction [for Tall Tales see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In his ...
Jacques, Norbert
(1880-1954) Luxembourg-born journalist and author, in Germany from around 1900, a journalist in World War One but not in active service, already controversial for the right-wing views that led to his support of National Socialism, and the ostracism he suffered after World War Two. Of sf interest is the Doktor Mabuse sequence – comprising Doktor Mabuse der Spieler (1920; trans Lilian A Clare as Dr Mabuse, Master of Mystery ...
Yeats, William Butler
(1865-1939) Irish playwright and poet, active from 1885, one of the two or three most significant twentieth century poets to write in English, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923. Unlike his close contemporary Wyndham Lewis, he was relatively immune to the kind of early twentieth century modernism sympathetic to pre-World War One Futurist epiphanies of the Machine (see ...
Churchill, Winston S
(1874-1965) UK politician and author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953; influential advocate of legalized Eugenics programmes, such as he (with others) expounded in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1912, with "deficiency" being defined in both medical and moral terms. His only novel, Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania (May-December 1899 Macmillan's Magazine; 1900), is a ...
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 ...