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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.
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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 ...
McNeilly, Wilfred Glassford
(1921-1983) Scottish author of numerous novels and stories under a variety of names as well as several 1960s nonfantastic titles under his own name; there has not yet been established a reliable list of titles by McNeilly under various pseudonyms and House Names. He achieved some minor notoriety when he claimed in print to have written all the work published under the byline W Howard Baker – actually McNeilly's editor on ...
Ould, Chris
(?1959- ) UK author whose sf novel, Road Lines (1985), is a Near-Future thriller set in an apocalyptic landscape reminiscent, to some, of the Mad Max films, though the main setting, a coercive inner-city Keep where the lower classes are imprisoned, lacks the escapist momentum of the movie. [JC]
Rice, Harry E
(? -? ) US author of Eve and the Evangelist: A Romance of A D 2108 (1908), a Utopia set in distant Near Future America, according to strict financial criteria (see Economics) that limit personal wealth to $50,000; great advances in Transportation are described at some length, as well as intercontinental travel by either by ...
Mercury
Mercury is the planet nearest the Sun, and hence is difficult to observe. Until the late nineteenth century it was believed to rotate on its axis every 24 hours or so, but this opinion was displaced by that of Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and Percival Lowell, who contended that it kept the same face permanently towards the Sun. Twentieth-century sf writers thus pictured it as having an extremely hot "dayside", a cold "nightside" ...
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 ...