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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 ...
Geissler, Ludwig A
(? -? ) US author, not to be confused with the American writer Ludwig S Geissler, or with several Germans with the same name; his Looking Beyond: A Sequel to "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy, and an Answer to "Looking Forward" by Richard Michaelis (1891), is a Sequel by Other Hands which, with some ingenuity, treats the return to 1888 of Julian West, Edward Bellamy's ...
Denton, Bradley
(1958- ) US author who began publishing sf with "The Music of the Spheres" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in March 1984, and who caused some impact in the field with his first novel, Wrack & Roll (1986), a contemporary Alternate-History tale which portrays heavy-metal musicians as the Heroes they might dream of being in a world absolutely ...
McEwan, Ian
(1948- ) UK author who began writing material of interest to the fields of the fantastic with "Solid Geometry" for The New Review in July 1974 (also February 1975 Fantastic), in which the protagonist's fascination with the "impossible" geometry (see Dimensions; Mathematics) suggested in the title drags his wife (post-coitally) into an almost literal ...
Ball, Jesse
(1978- ) US poet and author whose first novel, Samedi the Deafness (2007), which is set in a world sufficiently alternative to the consensual to be described in terms of Fantastika; in this world, as articulated through a complexly allusive telling, human paranoias shape events, as though they were genuinely predictive (Ball has been compared in this to Thomas Pynchon). Much of the tale is ...
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 ...