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 ...
Meyers, Marc André
(1946- ) Brazilian metallurgist – a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Program, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego – and author, mostly of nonfiction work in his field; of sf interest is Mayan Mars (2005), set mostly in Mexico, where two plot lines converge: a virus imported from Mars creates a ...
Hassaurek, F
(1832-1885) Austrian-born newspaper owner and author in the USA, fleeing there after the revolutions of 1848; he sometimes gave his given name as Frederick. He was the United States minister to Ecuador 1861-1865, an experience which may have inspired his unremarkable Lost Race novel, The Secret of the Andes: A Romance (1879), which focuses on a hidden band of Incas in their mountain redoubt. [JC]
Strange Adventures [comic]
US Comic (first run 1950-1973). DC Comics. Issues #1-2 bimonthly; issues #3-211 monthly; issues #212-244 bimonthly. Editor Julius Schwartz. Writers included Otto Binder, John Broome, Gardner F Fox, Sid Gerson, and Edmond Hamilton. Artists included Neal Adams, Murphy ...
Duncan, Ronald
(1914-1982) UK author, poet and playwright, Benjamin Britten's librettist for the opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946); he gained some acclaim for his sourly vatic drama and poetry in the 1940s, but became very much an outsider before his death; he was generally not thought of as a genre writer. The Dull Ass's Hoof (coll 1941) contains some fantasy plays. Some of the stories in The Perfect Mistress and Other Stories (coll 1969), A Kettle of Fish ...
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 ...