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.
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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 ...
Paton Walsh, Jill
(1937-2020) UK author, partner from the early 1970s of John Rowe Townsend; they were married from 2004 until his death in 2014. Much of her fiction was for Young Adult readers; she also wrote several nonfantastic detective novels [not listed below] including the Imogen Quy series set in a fictional University of Cambridge college, and four authorized Sequels by Another Hand ...
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
Term used to describe a form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game with gameplay resembling that of a Computer Role Playing Game. Players create characters with abilities distinct from those of their makers, and use them to explore a shared fictional world and cooperate or compete with each other to fight the enemies they find there. MMORPGs differ from ...
Best of Omni Science Fiction
US anthology series that was an offshoot of Omni magazine but which also published original material. The first volume, edited by Ben Bova and Don Myrus, published in March 1980, was all reprint, but was so successful, selling over 300,000 copies in three months, that consideration was given to issuing an all-sf Magazine. In the end a compromise was reached, with each volume a ...
Fox, Janet
(1940-2009) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Say It With Spiders" for Weirdbook #3 in 1970, most of her many stories being fantasy or horror; a selection from this work has been assembled as Witch's Dozen (coll 2003). Of sf interest is the Sharecropped Scorpio sequence for the Byron Preiss enterprise: Scorpio, an insectoid Alien on the run from his ...
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 ...