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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 ...
Johnson, Denis
(1949-2017) US author, born in Germany, and raised in various countries where his father, in the American State Department, was stationed; he began to publish poetry in the late 1960s. His first novel, Angels (1983), has no fantastic element, but his second, Fiskadoro (1985), is set in Post-Holocaust Key West after a period of Nuclear Winter, where an aged inhabitant confuses the desolation of ...
Jessup, Richard
(1925-1982) US author and screenwriter best known for works like The Cincinnati Kid (1963) who wrote a 1954 episode for the Television series Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, "The Space Projectile" and who may have participated – almost certainly with Joseph Greene – in writing the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet novels as by Carey ...
Tiptree, James, Jr
Pseudonym of US psychologist and author Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987), who was widely assumed to be a man, despite the deep rapport "he" displayed for women in stories like "The Women Men Don't See" (December 1973 F&SF). "James Tiptree Jr" flourished from 1967 until her identity was exposed in 1977. Beginning in 1974, she also wrote several sf stories as Raccoona Sheldon, and some earlier non-fantastic work under other names, including her first fiction, ...
Superman
In the same way that theories of Evolution provide an imaginative context for sf stories about the Origin of Man and Life on Other Worlds, so they govern attitudes to superhumans. There is a significant difference, though, between Darwin-inspired images of a "fitter" species and images inspired by Lamarckian and Bergsonian ideas of "creative evolution", in which the emergence of a superman ...
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 ...