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
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Monster Mania
Letter-sized, saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on middle-grade paper stock. Published by Renaissance Productions, New York. Three issues, October 1966 to April 1967. Editor: Russ Jones. / This was co-published by the artist/editor Russ Jones (1942- ) and Lee Irgang as a maturely oriented competitor to Forrest J Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland ...
Fergusson, Adam
(1932- ) UK politician, journalist and author, Conservative member of Parliament 1979-1984, a strong supporter of Britain's membership in the EEC. Of his nonfiction, he is best known for When Money Dies (1975), narrative description of the effect of hyperinflation on the 1920s Weimar Republic. His first novel, Roman Go Home (1969), is a mildly fantasticated Satire on the Roman Empire's abandonment of Britain in the ...
Aliens
This is the term, in both sf and popular culture, used to indicate sentient extraterrestrial beings – creatures from other worlds endowed with reason, consciousness, thought, Intelligence (the terms for and conceptions of this vital but slippery quality vary). Aliens may have minds somewhat less capable than ours, of comparable capacity, of greater (even vastly greater) power, or minds so different that comparison becomes impossible. They may appear as ...
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Film (1989). Paramount. Directed by William Shatner. Written by David Loughery from a story by Shatner, Harve Bennett, Loughery. Cast includes Persis Khambatta and the lead players from the Star Trek television series, along with Laurence Luckinbill. 107 minutes. Colour. / A visibly middle-aged, overweight crew enact a tepid melodrama in which the Enterprise is hijacked by a charismatic Vulcan healer, Sybok ...
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 ...