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 ...
Speculation
UK Fanzine edited by Peter Weston from Birmingham 1963-1973. 33 issues; mostly duplicated; UK quarto paper. / The first six issues, October 1963 to September 1964, were titled Zenith; the next seven, December 1964 to July 1966, carried the transitional title Zenith-Speculation; thereafter, from #14 in October 1966, it was simply Speculation. Averaging 60pp in its final incarnation, Speculation was for ...
Red Shirts
An initially joky but now often seriously used item of critical Terminology, based on fans' frequent observation that red-shirted security officers in the original Star Trek (1966-1969) tended to be rather quickly killed off. Thus a red shirt, or redshirt, is an expendable spear-carrier who does not survive for long. As with virtually every aspect of Star Trek, this trope is sent up in ...
Silver, R Norman
Pseudonym of UK author George Knight (? -? ). Novels of sf interest under this name include The Golden Dwarf: A Sensational Romance of Today (1903), in which a Mad Scientist attempts – surgically, as in H G Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – to transform young children into dwarfs and giants (see ...
Gibbons, Gavin
(1922-1978) UK publisher and author of both nonfiction and fiction; of the latter, By Space Ship to the Moon: A Tale of Adventure in Outer Space for Boys (1958), a Young Adult tale whose modestly familiar contents are hinted at in the full title. Other titles with a sound of sf – like The Coming of the Space Ships (1956) or They Rode in Space Ships (1957) – are in fact UFO books, and ...
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 ...