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 ...
Keyes, Noel
Pseudonym of British-born US author and anthologist David Noel Keightley (1932-2017), whose Contact (anth 1963) is a theme Anthology dealing with meetings of humans and Aliens (see First Contact). According to L W Currey, Sam Moskowitz "served as an anonymous collaborator and selected some of the contents". [PN/DRL]
Chesterton, Rupert
(? -? ) UK author, active for perhaps two decades from around 1907. In his only work of any sf interest – the Phantom series comprising The Phantom Battleship (1911) and The Captain of the "Phantom": The Further Adventures of Captain Vanstone of the "Phantom" Battleship (1921) – the valiant British naval officer Vanstone captains a mystery ship, with advanced Weapons, initially on behalf ...
Transfer
Film (1966). Co-produced, directed and written by David Cronenberg. Cast includes Rafe Macpherson and Mort Ritts. 7 minutes. Colour. / This 16mm short film, the first-ever by David Cronenberg and produced on a shoestring while the Canadian auteur studied English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Toronto, is notable more for the thematic foreshadowing of later ...
Duncan, Dave
Working name of Scottish-born petroleum geologist and author David John Duncan (1933-2018), in Canada from 1955, a citizen from 1960; he also wrote as by Sarah B Franklin and Ken Hood. His earlier singleton novels inclined mostly to sf. The first, A Rose-Red City (1987), complicatedly puts its twentieth-century protagonist into a walled Utopia, where demons (and the Minotaur) oppose his attempts to extract Ariadne from the world. Shadow ...
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 ...