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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 ...
Croatia
Croatian sf in its infancy (especially after the nineties) is not very different from the East European fiction and we can compare it to the Russian school of fiction. In the early days of sf in Croatia, writers dealt with adventurous and utopian themes, but later their focus shifted more to existential and social issues, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Croatian Patriotic war in the nineties; typically they now wrote about the life of the "little man" who is repressed by ...
D'Ignazio, Fred
Working name of US children's author Silvio Frederick D'Ignazio (1949- ), most of whose work is moderately distant from any sf or fantastic interest (except tales for younger children), with the exception of some titles in the Chip Mitchell Computer-whizz-kid sequence, Chip Mitchell: The Case of the Stolen Computer Brains (1982) and Chip Mitchell: The Case of the Robot Warriors (1984); ...
Haedicke, Paul
(1852-1903) German soldier and journalist who spent much of his career in the US, usually as a foreign correspondent for German papers; his sf novel, The Equalities of Para-Para, Written from the Dictations of George Rambler, M.D., F.R.G.S. (1895), set in a hidden, egalitarian Lost World in darkest Africa, is a Satire on the uniformitarian implications of a socialist Utopia whose egalitarianism ...
Swartwout, R Egerton
(1905-1951) US-born cartoonist and author, in the UK from early manhood. The Boat Race Murder (1933) is a nonfantastic detective novel. Of sf interest is It Might Have Happened: A Sketch of the Later Career of Rupert Lister Audenard [for full title see Checklist] (1934), an Alternate History of Britain whose Jonbar Point is the survival of Randolph Churchill (1849-1895) (here Rupert Audenard) ...
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 ...