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.
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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 ...
Pandemic [game]
Board Game (2007). Z-Man Games. Designed by Matt Leacock. / Pandemic is a cooperative board game for 2-4 players. Players must work together in order to prevent the Pandemic outbreak of four simultaneous diseases in hotspots around the world by travelling to international locations and fighting the contagion using their individual abilities. This early cooperative strategy board game is a ...
Hunter, Norman
(1899-1995) UK professional conjuror and author for children and Young Adult readers first active before World War Two, his publishing career having begun with Simplified Conjuring for All (1923); during a sojourn in South Africa, from 1949 to 1970, he wrote nothing. He began publishing work of genre interest with a humorous fairy tale, "The Bad Barons of Crashbania" (in Number Nine Joy Street, anth 1931, ed Michael Lynn), and began ...
Multiverse
Term originally coined outside sf as an alternative to "universe" that supposedly avoided any presupposition of a unique and ordered creation. Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (coll 1897): "Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe." This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William ...
Scientific Detective Monthly
US letter-size magazine; ten monthly issues, January to October 1930, published from New York by Techni-Craft Publishing Co; edited by Hugo Gernsback, with Arthur B Reeve as editorial consultant. It was a sister magazine to Science Wonder Stories (see Wonder Stories) and Air Wonder Stories. From issue #6 it was retitled ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...