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
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Testa, Dom
(? - ) US broadcaster and author, active for about forty years in the former capacity; his Young Adult Galahad sequence beginning with Galahad 1: The Comet's Curse (2004) is set after all human adults have died in a Pandemic caused by a virus imported from off-planet, and focuses on the adventures of a group of 251 children on a Spaceship en ...
Dessar, Leo Charles
(1847-1924) US judge and author whose The Royal Enchantress: A Romance of the Last Queen of the Berbers (1900) hovers comfortably between fantasy and sf in its recounting of the paranormal secret history of the historical Cahina, a late eighth-century partly-Jewish Berber ruler who opposed the Muslim conquest of inner Arabia. Her visions of the past and future have a Time Viewer intensity and detail. Her attempts to create a kind of ...
Winsor, Frederick
(1900-1958) US architect, anthologist and poet, the main author of The White House at Pooh Corner (performed 1938; 1938 chap) with Richard H Field, a mildly Satirical spoof play in verse on Politics in the years approaching World War Two. He is best known for the witty sf Parody Poetry assembled as The Space Child's Mother Goose ...
Corea, Chick
(1941-2021) US jazz composer and performer of largely instrumental music. Corea's career began in the 1960s with a number of fluent Latin-jazz releases. In the 1970s the influence of L Ron Hubbard (Corea converted to Scientology sometime around the start of this decade) began to make itself apparent in his music. The band Return to Forever, a side-project of Corea's, released half a dozen Scientologically-influenced albums, ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...