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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 ...
Lunts, Lev N
(1901-1924) Russian playwright, critic, translator and author, founder of the Serapion Brothers, a group of experimentalist authors, whose name he took from E T A Hoffmann's collection of that name. He is of specific sf interest for The City of Truth (trans John Silver from manuscript 1929), in which a surreal search by soldiers for the heart of Mother Russia deposits them in a Utopian City ...
Tolmie, Sarah
(1971- ) Canadian academic, poet and author, active from before 2000. Her first novel, The Stone Boatmen (2014), takes place in a dazzlingly oneiric trio of interconnected Cities, set like destination points of an Archipelago, on the edge of a surrounding sea; their deep history remains obscure, though a pervading sensation of some lurking Time Abyss hints at an sf ...
Gann, Ernest K
(1910-1991) US author, usually of thrillers, whose Brain 2000 (1980) is an sf spoof on Ecology, in which the extraction of oil from parts of the world causes gravitational and orbital disturbances. A smart child (see Children in SF) solves all our problems. [JC]
Wilder, Cherry
Pseudonym of New Zealand-born author Cherry Barbara Grimm (1930-2002), in Australia 1954-1976, in Germany until 1997, then in New Zealand until her death. After publishing short fiction and poetry she turned to sf, and chose the name Wilder. The themes of her first published sf story, "The Ark of James Carlyle" in New Writings in SF 24 (anth 1974) edited by Kenneth Bulmer, are the gradual rapprochement of, and ...
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 ...