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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.
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 ...
Fagan, H A
(1889-1963) South African judge and author, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of South Africa 1956-1959, whose writing career in Afrikaans extended from before 1914 to the year of his death. In his sf novel Ninya: A Fantasy of a Strange Little World (1956), which was first published in English, survivors of a crash landing on the far side of the Moon a century hence encounter many strange adventures of an emblematic nature reminiscent of C S ...
Lincoln, Maurice
Pseudonym of UK author Esmond Condy (1887-1962), whose two sf Satires display an uneasy bantering tone and slyly cluttered plots which make his or her identification of some potential interest. In Nothing Ever Happens (1927) two young UK men are transported to an unlocatable Island run by an impossibly old Master – it is conceivable that T H White's similar The Master (1957) ...
Schorer, Mark
(1908-1977) US author and academic, little associated with the literatures of the fantastic except for some stories with August Derleth, with whom he shared a birth city as well as attendance at the University of Wisconsin, where they wrote sf like "Riders in the Sky" (May 1928 Weird Tales), about Moon dwellers who come down to Earth to eat folk. Some of their later work was assembled as ...
Wurlitzer, Rudolph
(1937- ) US screenwriter and author, much of whose film work has been signed Rudy Wurlitzer; he is probably best known for early scripts for films like Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), though his first works were novels, most of which may be read as Fabulations in which sf elements are bleakly Equipoisal with a free-floating on-the-road gonzo ...
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 ...