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 ...
Ryman, Geoff
(1951- ) Canadian-born author who moved to the USA at age eleven, in the UK since 1973. He began publishing sf with "The Diary of the Translator" for New Worlds in 1976, but began to generate significant work only with the magazine version of The Unconquered Country: A Life History (Spring 1984 Interzone; rev 1986), which won the BSFA Award and the ...
DeStefano, Lauren
(1984- ) US author who has concentrated exclusively on Near Future Dystopias for the Young Adult market. The Chemical Garden Trilogy, comprising Wither (2011), Fever (2012) and Sever (2013), is set in an American culture savagely distorted by the consequences of a Genetic Engineering ...
Gravity
The force of gravity is the most inescapable and unvarying fact of terrestrial life, and when writers first sent characters into Spaceships and on to other planets the phenomenon of low gravity, or of no gravity at all, figured prominently among the wonders of space. Many early authors did not realize that complete weightlessness is a consequence of free fall, but this soon became a fact to be taken for granted in describing ...
Tales of Moreauvia
Canadian Semiprozine published by Creative Guy Publishing, Vancouver, British Columbia, and edited by Peter S Allen; letter-size, planned as semi-annual, but the four issues are dated Spring 2008, Summer 2009, Winter (November) 2010 and finally Summer 2012. It labelled itself "Flights of Historical Fancy", the contents being a mixture of Steampunk, Alternate History and historical sf (see ...
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 ...