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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 ...
Abre Los Ojos
Film (1997; vt Open Your Eyes). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Written by Amenábar & Mateo Gil. Cast includes Penélope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martinez, Najwa Nimri and Eduardo Noriega. 117 minutes. Colour. / Playboy César's discarded girlfriend Nuria (Nimri) takes revenge by crashing their car, killing herself and leaves César (Noriega) facially disfigured; his unravelling life seems briefly repaired by his new love Sofía (Cruz) ...
Ray, Robert
(1928- ) Hungarian-born author, who may have changed or modified his name after coming to the UK in 1957. He began publishing sf with "The Craving for Blackness" in New Worlds for September 1962, set in a world where only women can go into space. His sf novels, bleak but otherwise unexceptional, are No Stars for Us (1964), The Seedy (1969) – whose titular protagonist is a fertile exception to near-universal ...
Elliott, Bruce
(1914-1973) US author and editor, active mainly in the sf field in the early 1950s, though his first story of genre interest was "Jungle Jazz" for Doc Savage magazine in June 1944; in the 1940s, he also wrote several stories for the magazine sequence The Shadow (see The Shadow). His sf novels – Asylum Earth (October 1952 Startling; 1968) and ...
Nichol, C A Scrymsour
(1830-1916) UK author, mother-in-law of Ella Scrymsour; her sf novel, The Mystery of the North Pole (1908), is a Lost Race tale in which a Utopia founded by ancient Israelites is discovered in the Arctic. [JC]
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 ...