The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction win the Hugo Award for Best Related Work!
The week begins with the wonderful news that The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was presented with the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, at Chicon, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention.
The Hugo Award is the biggest prize in science fiction and a major international accolade – having been presented since 1953 and won by some of the biggest names in SF – and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has won an award for each of its three editions, which is an incredible achievement.
The 1st edition, published in 1979, contained 3,574 entries, comprised of some 730,000 words. The 2nd edition (1993) ran to 6,571 entries and approximately 1.3 million words. The 3rd (online) edition, launched in October 2011 alongside, and in partnership with, Gollancz’s groundbreaking SF Gateway initiative, includes 13,284 entries and runs to a staggering 3.7 million words . . . so far!
Many congratulations to chief editors John Clute and David Langford, Managing Editor Graham Sleight, Editor Emeritus Peter Nicholls, and the many contributors to the SFE. We leave the last word to Graham Sleight, who said in his acceptance speech:
‘We have built – and continue to build – the SFE for the whole of the science fiction community. It’s intended for fans, academics, writers, publishers, everyone: for any and all who are hungry for information about this field. I will admit to a twinge of worry about whether a project like this would still be of use to the community in the age of Wikipedia; but I guess that this honour says, among other things, that the community does still want and need an encyclopedia of this kind. And as long as that continues, we’ll keep on building it.’