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.
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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 ...
Finn, Ralph L
(1912-1999) UK author and journalist who published widely, collecting some of his short fiction as Collected Stories of Ralph L Finn (coll 1946 chap); in his notes on "This Sorry Scheme" (magazine publication undated), George Locke suggests that the tale prefigures Jack Finney's far more complex Time and Again (1970). Of some sf interest are three novels based on the time theories of J W ...
Martin, Troy Kennedy
(1932-2009) Scottish-born scriptwriter, in England from childhood, best known for non-fantastic work such as the BBC police procedural series Z Cars (1962-1978), which he created and for which he supplied scripts intermittently; brother of Ian Kennedy Martin. Some of the Satirical nihilism of his script for the film Kelly's Heroes (1970), directed by Brian G Hutton, disappeared when the studio ...
Gardner, John
(1926-2007) UK author who was a minister for several years before becoming an agnostic, a drama critic, and the creator of the Boysie Oakes sequence of spy thrillers spoofing Ian Fleming's James Bond books, most famously in The Liquidator (1964); one Boysie Oakes tale, Founder Member (1969), involves its hero in a Sex experiment in space. From 1981 to 1996, Gardner wrote 14 novels officially ...
Boys' Papers
Although boys' papers could easily be dismissed as being of negligible literary value, perhaps unjustly since Upton Sinclair and other eminent authors found their footing there, they played an important role in the History of SF in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, by creating a potential readership for the SF Magazines and by ...
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 ...