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 ...
Beebee, Chris
(? - ) UK author known exclusively for his Cipola sequence – comprising The Hub (1987) and The Main Event (1989) – which is set in the twenty-first century on Earth and in a Space Habitat. The world of the sequence is dominated by Computers, and trouble brews when the GRAIL programs go missing; the protagonist tries to cope. [JC]
Roszak, Theodore
(1933-2011) US historian – latterly professor emeritus of history at California State University – and author of several works of cultural criticism, most famously The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) and also including The Cult of Information (1986), which is highly sceptical about the contemporary boom in Information Theory. He began writing sf with Bugs (1981), in which a frightened child ...
Bear, Elizabeth
Working name of Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky (1971- ), US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "e e 'doc' cummings" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in March 2003, and who has released at least fifty stories since; she won the 2005 John W Campbell Award for best new writer, and the Hugo award for "Shoggoths in Bloom" (March 2008 ...
Ramsey, Milton Worth
(1848-1906) US author who – although he self-published his sf novels – was of some interest. In Six Thousand Years Hence (1891) a visiting planet drags the protagonist's City into space, where he and his colleagues embark upon a Fantastic Voyage to several other civilizations, including a complex advanced culture within the Sun, and return millennia hence to a tamed high-tech ...
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 ...