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 ...
Greenhough, Terry
Working name of UK author Terence Greenhough (1944-2002) for most of his fiction, though he used the pseudonym Andrew Lester for the routine novel The Thrice-Born (1976), about persecuted hermaphrodites on a distant planet. Greenhough began publishing sf with "The Tree in the Forest" for Science Fiction Monthly in 1974. After Friend of Pharaoh (1975), an historical romance, his first sf novel, Time and Timothy Grenville (1975), typically of this ...
Steele, Allen
(1958- ) US journalist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Live from the Mars Hotel" for Asimov's, mid-December 1988; his short fiction has been assembled as Rude Astronauts: Real and Imagined Stories (coll 1993), All-American Alien Boy (coll 1996), American Beauty (coll 2003) and The Last Science Fiction Writer (coll 2008). Several of his stories have won prizes, ...
Cantrell, Christian
(1973- ) US software entrepreneur and author whose Near Future Children of Occam sequence beginning with Containment (2010) traverses various planets of our Solar System including Venus, which is under process of being occupied by Homo sapiens as Earth has been spoliated by Ecological degradation and ...
Roycraft, Jaye
(? - ) US author of Raincraft (2005), a noirish detective romance whose young protagonist, sent to a new planet, finds her Telepathic powers both useful and potentially deadly (as they mime the powers of humanity's loathed foes); in the Che Kincade sequence comprising Half Past Hell (2012) and Hell's Warrior (2012), which features different protagonists, ...
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 ...