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 ...
Ruddell, Gary
(1951- ) American artist, sometimes credited in error as Garry Ruddell. As a high school student, the precocious Ruddell was already selling interior artwork to car magazines, but he formally launched his artistic career after earning a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1975. While also working for magazines like Rolling Stone and Playboy and other clients, Ruddell began painting sf book covers in 1981 with a ...
Melchiorri, Anthony J
(? - ) US biomedical engineer and author, often in collaboration with Nicholas Sanbury Smith, whose entry see for the joint Extinction Cycle: Dark Age sequence beginning with Extinction Shadow (2019). His other work is all solo. His first novel, which is like most of his work focused on heavily foregrounded action responses to planetary crises, is The God Organ (2014). His ...
Barrett, William E
(1900-1986) US amateur pilot and author, many of whose stories were nonfantastic recounts of World War One combat; he had published Flight from Youth (1939) before the war, later incorporating it into The Edge of Things (coll 1960), whose three stories all relate in some way to flying. Much earlier, he began publishing short stories with "The Music of Madness" for Weird Tales, March 1926. His sf novel, The Fools of Time ...
Metzger, Robert A
(1956- ) US electrical engineer, technical journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "An Unfiltered Man" for Aboriginal in September/October 1987, publishing his short fiction almost exclusively with that magazine until it ceased publication in 2001. As a Hard SF writer who has stated he has "the temperament of an engineer", he tends to write stories in which problems are solvable, ...
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 ...