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
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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 ...
Berkeley, Reginald
(1890-1935) UK soldier, politician – Liberal Member of Parliament 1922-1924 – playwright and author in various genres. Apparently inadvertently, he created one of the lasting myths of World War One in his novel about the German execution of Edith Cavell, Dawn: A Biographical Novel of Edith Cavell (1928), in which a German soldier named Rammler refuses to participate in the firing squad, and is himself executed. Berkeley's belief in ...
Return of Captain Invincible, The
Film (1982). Willarra/Seven Keys. Directed by Philippe Mora. Written by Steven E De Souza, Andrew Gaty; additional dialogue Peter Smalley. Cast includes Alan Arkin, Kate Fitzpatrick and Christopher Lee. 91 minutes. Colour. / Australian musical comedy whose premise is that its eponymous Superhero (Arkin), purged in the USA of the McCarthy period as "a premature anti-fascist", is now a washed-up drunk. Discovered in Sydney by policewoman Patty Patria ...
Biheguan Zhuren
["Master of the Jade Lotus Pavilion"] Pseudonym of Jin Zuoli (? -? ), a Chinese author whose first work of genre note Huangjin Shijie ["Golden World"] (1907 Xiaoshuo Lin) imagined Chinese coolies in America resisting a real-world 1894 racial exclusion law by founding a Utopian community. Inspired in part by the fiction of Liang Qichao, he subsequently wrote ...
Goll, Reinhold W
(1897-1993) US author of three unremarkable Space Operas for Young Adult readers. Two of these comprise the Veta sequence, beginning with The Visitors from Planet Veta (1961). [JC]
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 ...