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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.
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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 ...
Wilson, Peter Lamborn
(1945-2022) US anarchist author and poet who also wrote as by Hakim or (for political essays) Hakim Bey. He was controversial for occasional defences of paedophilia; his first novel of genre interest, Crowstone (1983) as by Hakim, is described on the cover as "A sword and sorcery boy-love tale" (see Sword and Sorcery). As Wilson he wrote some short sf for Interzone, ...
Balfour, Bruce
(?1958- ) US Comics author, computer games designer from the 1980s, and author who began publishing fiction of genre interest with "Thunder Pigeon" for Fantasy Book in June 1985. In comics, he is perhaps best known for Jack the Ripper (October 1989-February 1990 Eternity Comics; graph 1990) illustrated Paul Mendoza, and for writing Keith Laumer's Retief (December 1989-October 1990 ...
Corpsicle
One of the wittier items of sf Terminology, coined by Frederik Pohl as "corpse-sicle" in his contribution to the Cryonics symposium – also including Robert C W Ettinger – "Immortality Through Freezing" (August 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow), and contracted to "corpsicle" in Pohl's novel ...
Doten, Mark
(1978- ) US editor and author in whose first novel, The Infernal (2015), a feral child suffering burns is found in the ruins of contemporary Iraq. His American captors plug him into an interrogation device known as a Memex which is "guaranteed " to extract truth from its subjects, and he begins to speak in tongues, channelling various figures from Osama bin Laden to Mark Zuckerberg. The tale avoids any thin-concept understanding in terms of ...
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 ...