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 ...
Boyle, T Coraghessan
(1948- ) US author who sometimes signs his more recent work as T C Boyle; very much better known for his non-fantastic fiction – novels like World's End (1987) or The Road to Wellville (1993) – than for his relatively rare (and recent) sf. Several stories to be found in After the Plague: Stories (coll 2001) are of sf interest, including the Post-Holocaust title story, which is set ...
Toolis, Lorna
(1952-2021) Canadian librarian and editor, initially involved in Canadian Fandom, best known for her long successful tenure as head of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy in the Toronto Public Library system from 1986, when the collection was still known as The Spaced Out Library or SoL, until her retirement in 2017. Having shepherded with great care in a demanding ...
Hogan, James P
(1941-2010) UK-born systems-design engineer and author, in the USA from 1977 and latterly in Ireland; he was a full-time author from 1979. His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the sf imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment/Giants sequence, being followed ...
Oz
Japanese Original Video Animation (1992), based on the Manga by Natsumi Itsuki. Madhouse. Directed by Katsuhisa Yamada. Written by Mami Watanabe. Voice cast includes Toshiko Fujita, Yasunori Matsumoto, Yuko Minaguchi, Yuji Mitsuya, Tamio Ohki, Keiko Toda, Kōichi Yamadera and Mari Yokoo. Two 35-minute episodes. Colour. / In 1990, World War Three and the resulting six-month ...
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 ...