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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 ...
Batchelor, John Calvin
(1948- ) US author whose first two novels, The Further Adventures of Halley's Comet (1980) and The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983), are borderline fantasy and sf respectively. He has also published two mainstream novels, American Falls (1985) and Gordon Liddy Is My Muse, by Tommy "Tip" Paine (1990). With John R Hamilton he wrote Thunder in the Dust: Images of Western Movies (1987). / ...
de Béthune, Chevalier
(? -? ) French author, who may or may not be related to the influential Béthune family, of Relation du Monde de Mercure (1750; trans Brian Stableford as The World of Mercury 2015) vividly describes a Mercury inhabited by various species of Aliens some of whom dwell in Cities built on rigidly geometrical ...
Saccomanno, Guillermo
(1948- ) Argentinian Comics scriptwriter, poet and author, active from the early 1970s. He is of broad genre interest for his fifth novel 77 (2008; trans Andrea G Labinger 2019), where Kafkaesque topoi (see also Fantastika) markedly enrich a memoir-like narrative focused on the beginning of the Videla dictatorship in Argentina in 1977; ...
Viking, Otto
(1885-1966) Danish Catholic bishop, associated with Theosophy, and author whose sf novel is A klode griber ind (written 1954; 1961; trans as A World Intervenes 1964). A young Danish couple is recruited by a secret organization based on Venus that makes use of flying saucers (see UFOs) and has planted a hidden colony in Antarctica, aiming to help Earth through its crisis of development ...
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 ...