Welcome to the Third Edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls (emeritus) and Graham Sleight (managing). All the more than 18,000 entries are free to read online; samples appear below. Click here for the Introduction and more on the text; here for Frequently Asked Questions; here for Advice to Students on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more on searching here) or browse the menu categories to the right of the SFE logo. To see what links to the current entry and to identify contributors' initials, click the Incoming / Citation button at the top of the entry.

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Russo, Carol

Tagged: Art

(?   -    ). American book designer, sometimes credited as a cover artist. She graduated from New York's School of Visual Arts and first worked as a book designer for William Morrow before moving to a similar position at Ace Books, where she met Tom Doherty and Jim Baen, forging friendships that led to her long-term relationships with the companies they later headed, Tor Books and Baen Books. As one might expect from her background, many of her covers are dominated by the book's title and author's name, with few pictorial elements, though these can be appealing in their own right, like her cover for Orson Scott Card's Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card (coll 1990), where...

Aelita Award

Tagged: Award

The most prestigious Soviet sf award, founded in 1981 by the Russian Federation Writers' Union and Ural'skii sledopyt ["Urals Pathfinder"] magazine. The latter was published from the city of Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk until 1991), so the ceremony is held there as part of the annual Aelita Convention. The winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Although instituted as an award for the best single sf work published in the previous year, it appears to have become a sort of "Life Achievement" trophy. Winners are listed below. [DRL/VG]Aelita Award winners 1981: (tie) Arkady and Boris Strugatski; Alexander Kazantsev 1982: Zinovii Yuriev 1983: Vladislav Krapivin 1984: Sergei Snegov 1985: Sergei Pa...

X-Men

Tagged: Publication | Comics

US Comic-book series, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for Marvel Comics in 1963. Kirby drew the first 11 issues and Lee wrote the first 19. Not as immediately successful as Marvel's other properties, it had an initial 66-issue run, and then ran reprints until #93 (1974). A new team of X-Men was introduced in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (cover dated May 1975, released in February). The success of this issue led to a relaunch of the series with #94 later that year. Many highly regarded artists have worked on the series over the years, notably Neal Adams, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum, Jim Lee, James Steranko and Barry Windsor-Smith; while later writers have been Roy Thomas (#20-#43, #55-#64 and #66), Ar...

Hugo

Tagged: Award

The annual awards given by the World SF Society, comprising members of the Worldcon. The awards were originally known as the Science Fiction Achievement Awards while affectionately termed Hugos in honour of Hugo Gernsback; the name was officially changed to the Hugo Awards when the US authorities declined to allow a service mark on the original name. Hugos were first awarded at the 1953 World SF Convention (see Worldcon); the idea was then dropped for a year (1954), but since 1955 the awards have been annual. They have always been fan-voted awards as opposed to, say, the Nebula or Philip K Dick Award, which are voted on by different categories of professional reader. The original idea, from...

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