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 ...
Grok
Item of sf Terminology coined in Robert A Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; text restored 1991), which was rapidly adopted in Fan Language and by late-1960s counterculture writers, and became sufficiently widespread to be regarded as having entered the English language – as recorded in The Oxford English Dictionary (1989). In Heinlein's novel ...
Gurney, James
(1958- ) US illustrator, raised in California, who studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Gurney made his sf debut with a cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1982, but his real baptism of fire that year was working as one of only two background painters on the animated Sword-and-Sorcery film Fire and Ice (1982). Gurney, who works in oils, primarily ...
Hoch, Edward D
(1930-2008) US author best known for his crime novels and stories, his first story, "Village of the Dead" for Famous Detective Stories in December 1955, introducing Simon Ark, an Occult Detective [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest. Some of these stories are collected in The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (coll 1971), ...
Hendow, Z S
(? -? ) UK author of a short Utopia, The Future Power; Or, the Great Revolution of 190- (1897 chap), in which a Great Strike, in which the army joins, ensures an economically secure world. [JC]
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 ...