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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Johnson, Toby
Working name of US author Edwin Clark Johnson (1945- ), whose Plague: A Novel About Healing (1987) is a Near Future medical thriller, and whose Secret Matter (1990; rev 2005) is a First Contact novel set in San Francisco after a devastating earthquake, the encounter leading to a clement gay Utopia. [JC]
Key, Frank
Pseudonym of UK author and broadcaster Paul Byrne (1959-2019), whose early work appeared as limited-edition pamphlets – often self-illustrated – from the London-based Malice Aforethought Press which he co-founded in 1986 with Maxim Décharné (also published by the press). The first to be of genre interest, if tangentially, is perhaps Forty Visits to the Worm Farm (1987 chap). Key's stories tend towards surrealism and ...
Short, Gertrude
(1902-1968) US film actor and author, none of the films she appeared in being sf; of sf interest, however, is her novel, A Visitor from Venus (1949), in which the eponymous visitor, from a Utopian Venus inhabited solely by females, comes to Earth and expresses her shock in Satirical terms at the condition of women on this planet (see Feminism). [JC]
Space Wars Heroes
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint. Published by Myron Fass as Stories, Layouts and Press. Editor: probably Jeffrey Goodman. Three bimonthly issues, 1979. / This Fass publication focused somewhat more heavily on Television than its stablemates, covering such programmes as Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) and The ...
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 ...