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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 ...
Gunn, Neil M
(1891-1973) Scottish author and civil servant, author of many novels, the first being Grey Coast (1926). It and some others – like Morning Tide (1931), The Lost Glen (1932), Second Sight (1940) and The Silver Bough (1948) – contain fantasy elements of interest, reminiscent at times of the Celtic Twilight writings of Fiona MacLeod (William Sharp, 1855-1905) [see The ...
Balzac, Honoré de
(1799-1850) French author whose enormous oeuvre – currently assembled in the Pléïade series in an edition over 20,000 pages long [not listed below] – is like Jules Verne a bibliographer's nightmare. Of his numerous early sensational novels, few translations seem to exist, and his later supernatural fiction appears in very various and chameleon guises. But some titles are of genre interest: ...
White, Nathanial
(1983- ) US author whose first novel, the Near Future Conscious Designs (2022), explicitly employs his own experience of accident-caused paralysis and recovery of bodily functions in an exploration of the state of mind of a paraplegic offered the chance to desubstantiate himself into a "Second Self" in a Virtual Reality Utopia. [JC]
McNeilly, Wilfred Glassford
(1921-1983) Scottish author of numerous novels and stories under a variety of names as well as several 1960s nonfantastic titles under his own name; there has not yet been established a reliable list of titles by McNeilly under various pseudonyms and House Names. He achieved some minor notoriety when he claimed in print to have written all the work published under the byline W Howard Baker – actually McNeilly's editor on ...
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 ...