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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 ...
Orwell, George
Pseudonym of Indian-born UK author Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), briefly but intensely in the early 1940s the partner of Inez Holden; much of his best work was contained in his impassioned journalism and essays, assembled in the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (each coll 1968). His fiction and extended social criticism, as in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), also demonstrates his ...
Gilbert, Stephen
(1912-2010) Irish businessman, journalist and author whose first novel, The Landslide (1943), is of sf interest, being a Parallel-World fantasy of some complexity in which primeval eggs, exposed by the titular event, begin to hatch into dragons; his second sf novel, Monkeyface (1948), movingly explores the familiar territory of the self-aware ape (see Apes as Human); his third, ...
Barr, John A
(1855-1907) New Zealand solicitor and author who also wrote as by R W Brock and Gilbert Rock; after proving unable to meet his costs on a property development, he left New Zealand, unfortunately for his reputation departing before the transfer of his obligations had been properly established in law. The Crime of the Golden Gully: An Australian Romance (1888) as by Gilbert Rock, an adventure tale centring on the discovery of a gold mine, edges towards the fantastic. Of more sf ...
Brussolo, Serge
(1951- ) French author active since the early 1980s; he has also published as by Zeb Chillicothe, Doom Kitty, D Morlok and Akira Suzuko. He has been prolific in several genres throughout his career, though for a decade or so from about 1981 he concentrated almost exclusively on sf, much of this output adventurously Equipoisal, with mythopoeic topoi conversing, at times joltingly, with plot lines derived from American ...
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 ...