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Hitchcon
Hitchcon was a science fiction convention held at the Southbank Centre in London, England, on 11 October 2009. It celebrated the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the comic sci-fi This is a list of science fiction comedy works—those mixing soft science fiction or science fantasy with comedy. Literature * Douglas Adams' novels: ** ''The'' ''Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' and sequels **''Dirk Gently's Holistic Detec ... series '' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' by Douglas Adams. The convention also saw the official launch for the sixth book in the series, '' And Another Thing...'', written by Eoin Colfer, after Adams died in 2001. Hitchcon was organised by Pan Macmillan, publisher of the original series, and Penguin Books, publisher of ''And Another Thing...''. Pan Macmillan published a new version of the original series on 1 September 2009, 42 days before the anniversary. A new website was launched, which includes competitions, games a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Convention
Science fiction conventions are gatherings of fans of the speculative fiction genre, science fiction. Historically, science fiction conventions had focused primarily on literature, but the purview of many extends to such other avenues of expression as films, television, comics, animation, and games. The format can vary but will tend to have a few similar features such as a guest of honour, discussion panels, readings and large special events such as opening/closing ceremonies and some form of party or entertainment. Science fiction conventions started off primarily in the UK and US but have now spread further and several countries have their own individual conventions as well as playing host to rotating international conventions. History The precise time and place of the first science fiction convention is a matter of some dispute. The idea and form was clearly anticipated in Robert Bloch's short story about a large convention of writers, "The Ultimate Ultimatum" (''Fantasy M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year."About Penguin – company history" , Penguin Books. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths Group (United Kingdom), Woolworths and other stores for Sixpence (British coin), sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science. Penguin Books is now an imprint (trade name), imprint of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defunct Science Fiction Conventions
{{Disambiguation ...
Defunct (no longer in use or active) may refer to: * ''Defunct'' (video game), 2014 * Zombie process or defunct process, in Unix-like operating systems See also * * :Former entities * End-of-life product * Obsolescence Obsolescence is the state of being which occurs when an object, service, or practice is no longer maintained or required even though it may still be in good working order. It usually happens when something that is more efficient or less risky r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2009 In London
9 (nine) is the natural number following and preceding . Evolution of the Arabic digit In the beginning, various Indians wrote a digit 9 similar in shape to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a -look-alike. The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the sign @ encircles a lowercase ''a''. As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller. Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle. The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic. While the shape of the glyph for the digit 9 has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the character usually has a descender, as, for example, in . The mod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Conventions In The United Kingdom
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clive Anderson
Clive Stuart Anderson (born 10 December 1952) is an English television and radio presenter, comedy writer, and former barrister. Winner of a British Comedy Award in 1991, Anderson began experimenting with comedy and writing comedic scripts during his 15-year legal career, before starring in ''Whose Line Is It Anyway?'' on BBC Radio 4, then later Channel 4. He has also hosted many radio programmes, and made guest appearances on '' Have I Got News for You'', ''Mock the Week'' and '' QI''. Early life Anderson's mother was English and his parents met while serving in the RAF. He was educated at Stanburn Primary School and Harrow County School for Boys then a grammar school which closed in 1975. His group of contemporaries included Geoffrey Perkins and Michael Portillo. His Scottish father originally from Glasgow was promoted to manager of the Bradford & Bingley's Building Society, Wembley branch. Anderson attended Selwyn College, Cambridge, where, from 1974 to 1975, he was Presid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marvin The Paranoid Android
Marvin the Paranoid Android is a fictional character in ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' series by Douglas Adams. Marvin is the ship's robot aboard the starship ''Heart of Gold''. Originally built as one of many failed prototypes of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's ''GPP'' (Genuine People Personalities) technology, Marvin is afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a "brain the size of a planet" which he is seldom, if ever, given the chance to use. Instead, the crew request him merely to carry out mundane jobs such as "opening the door". Indeed, the true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect. Marvin claims he is 50,000 times more intelligent than a human (or 30 billion times more intelligent than a live mattress), though this is, if anything, an underestimation. When kidnapped by the bellicose Krikkit robots and tied to the interfaces of their intelligent war ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and 'Reblogging, retweet' tweets, while unregistered users only have the ability to read public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile Frontend and backend, frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams (Internet entrepreneur), Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and has more than 25 offices around the world. , more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion Web search query, search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten List of most popular websites, most-visited websites and has been de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
42 (number)
42 (forty-two) is the natural number that follows 41 (number), 41 and precedes 43 (number), 43. Mathematics Forty-two (42) is a pronic number and an abundant number; its prime factorization (2\times 3\times 7) makes it the second sphenic number and also the second of the form (2\times 3\times r). Additional properties of the number 42 include: * It is the number of isomorphism classes of all simple and oriented directed graphs on 4 vertices. In other words, it is the number of all possible outcomes (up to isomorphism) of a tournament consisting of 4 teams where the game between any pair of teams results in three possible outcomes: the first team wins, the second team wins, or there is a draw. The group stage of the FIFA World cup is a good example. * It is the third primary pseudoperfect number. * It is a Catalan number. Consequently, 42 is the number of noncrossing partitions of a set of five elements, the number of triangulations of a heptagon, the number of rooted ordered bina ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pan Macmillan
Pan Books is a publishing imprint (trade name), imprint that first became active in the 1940s and is now part of the United Kingdom, British-based Macmillan Publishers, owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany. Pan Books began as an independent publisher, established in 1944 by Alan Bott, previously known for his memoirs of his experiences as a flying ace in the First World War. The Pan Books logo, showing the ancient Greek god Pan (god), Pan playing pan-pipes, was designed by Mervyn Peake. A few years after it was founded, Pan Books was bought out by a consortium of several publishing houses, including Macmillan, William Collins, Sons, Collins, Heinemann (publisher)#Heinemann UK history, Heinemann, and, briefly, Hodder & Stoughton. It became wholly owned by Macmillan in 1987. Pan specialised in publishing paperback fiction and, along with Penguin Books, was one of the first popular publishers of this format in the UK. Many popular authors saw their works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is a complex of artistic venues in London, England, on the South Bank of the River Thames (between Hungerford Bridge and Waterloo Bridge). It comprises three main performance venues (the Royal Festival Hall including the National Poetry Library, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room), together with the Hayward Gallery, and is Europe’s largest centre for the arts. It attracted 4.36 million visitors during 2019. Over two thousand paid performances of music, dance and literature are staged at Southbank Centre each year, as well as over two thousand free events and an education programme, in and around the performing arts venues. In addition, three to six major art exhibitions are presented at the Hayward Gallery yearly, and national touring exhibitions reach over 100 venues across the UK. Location Southbank Centre's site, which formerly extended to 21 acres (85,000 m2) from County Hall to Waterloo Bridge, is fronted by The Queen’s Walk. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Bookseller
''The Bookseller'' is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. Philip Jones is editor-in-chief of the weekly print edition of the magazine and the website. The magazine is home to the ''Bookseller''/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, a humorous award given annually to the book with the oddest title. The award is organised by ''The Bookseller''s diarist, Horace Bent, and had been administered in recent years by the former deputy editor, Joel Rickett, and former charts editor, Philip Stone. ''We Love This Book'' is its quarterly sister consumer website and email newsletter. The subscription-only magazine is read by around 30,000 persons each week, in more than 90 countries, and contains the latest news from the publishing and bookselling worlds, in-depth analysis, pre-publication book previews and author interviews. It is the first publication to publish official weekly bestseller lists in the UK. It has also created the first UK-based e-book sales r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
