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 ...
McGuire, John J
(1917-1981) US author best known for his collaborations with H Beam Piper on the sf action novel Crisis in 2140 (February-March 1953 Astounding as "Null-ABC"; 1957) and on A Planet for Texans (March 1957 Fantastic Universe as "Lone Star Planet"; 1958), Planetary Romance in the form of a Western set on New ...
Web Terror Stories
US Digest-size weird fiction magazine. Published by Robert C Sproul (1920-2007) as Candar Publishing Company. Credited editor was Sproul. Eight issues, August 1962 to June 1965. Publication, nominally quarterly, was in fact erratic. / This title has a complex history involving several name changes. It began as Saturn, which Sproul had published briefly from 1957 to 1958; this continued as the crime magazine ...
Oldfield, Mike
(1953- ) English composer and performer, whose multi-layered, multi-instrumental and usually vocal-free work has enjoyed considerable commercial success. His first and perhaps most influential release, Tubular Bells (1973) was a fluently inventive, varied and musically charming piece, not least in its cod-caveman interlude "Piltdown Man". Of his many dozen subsequent releases, Oldfield's most straightforwardly science-fictional album is ...
Szal, Jeremy
(1995- ) Australian editor, politician and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Aliens Ate My Anti-Grav Speeder" in Robot and Raygun for April 2014. Although his first novel Stormblood (2020) may accurately be described as Military SF set in an interstellar Space Opera venue, the heart of the tale revolves more intimately around the protagonist and his companions' ...
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 ...