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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.
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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 ...
Day, Donald B
(1909-1978) Pioneer sf indexer, resident in Oregon. His Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1926-1950 (1952; rev 1982), has become, along with its successors compiled by other hands (see Bibliographies), an essential tool for sf research. [PN]
Noël, Atanielle Annyn
(1947- ) Now the legal name of the US author who, under her earlier legal name, Ruth S Noel, published two studies of J R R Tolkien: The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth (1974 chap) and The Mythology of Middle-Earth: A Study of Tolkien's Mythology and its Relationship to the Myths of the Ancient World (1977). Her three novels as Atanielle Annyn Noel rather mercilessly tumble together fantasy, sf and ...
Musica Elettronica Viva
Experimental music group founded in Rome in 1966; active until 2017; commonly abbreviated to MEV. Initially with a somewhat nebulous line-up, it soon coalesced around the core trio of Alvin Curran (1938- ), Frederick Rzewski (1938-2021) and Richard Teitelbaum (1939-2020), each of whom had distinguished careers in avant-garde music. Their first album, SpaceCraft (1967) mixes electronics, saxophone and organ to attempt to convey the sensation of ...
Serviss, Garrett P
(1851-1929) US journalist, amateur (but knowledgeable) astronomer and author who majored in science at Cornell University, then studied law, and only around 1874 entered journalism, achieving some fame, writing as the "Sun's Astronomer", for a column on Astronomy in the New York Sun between 1876 and 1892. At the end of 1897 he was commissioned to write an unofficial sequel to an equally unofficial 1897 US newspaper revision of H G ...
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 ...