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 ...
Galactic Lens
This term, from Astronomy, makes frequent appearance in sf. It refers to the fact that our Galaxy is (like many others) approximately lens-shaped – it is a disc containing spiral arms, but like a lens it has a central bulge. Our own position in the Galaxy is quite a long way from the core; when we look towards the centre of the "lens", the direction in which the stars are clustered most thickly, we see the so-called Milky Way. Towards the outer rim of the ...
Buckley, Christopher
(1952- ) US author – son of William F Buckley Jr (1925-2008), himself the author of some fantasy but not sf – whose novels have been Satires of contemporary American life which sometimes edge towards the fantastic. Typical of these is Little Green Man (1999), in which the media pundit protagonist believes he has been abducted by Aliens but has in fact been abducted by a government agency, so ...
Grimes
Working name of Canadian singer and musician Claire Elise Boucher (1988- ). Her first album Geidi Primes (2010) is a beautiful, slippery collection of hypnagogic electronic pop songs inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune (fixup 1965) and the film version Dune (1984) directed by David Lynch. Several tracks are named after places ("Caladan") or ...
Swan, H E
(? -? ) US author of It Might Be: A Story of the Future Progress of the Sciences, the Wonderful Advancement in the Methods of Government and the Happy State of the People (1896), whose main action is set in a dishevelled Near Future America, though something of a teetotal Utopia is taking shape, with advanced Technology including ...
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 ...