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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 ...
Silberrad, Una L
(1872-1955) UK author, active for about half a century from the mid 1890s, most of her novels comfortably but lucidly supportive of decent middle-class values established during her early prime, but with a bracing Feminist element detectable in many tales. Of sf interest is The Affairs of John Bolsover (coll of linked stories 1911), narrated by an journalist in Near Future London, around 1960; ...
Kesey, Ken
(1935-2001) US author, best known for his first published novel, the nonfantastic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and for his central role in creating the avowedly countercultural "Merry Pranksters" in 1964, as memorably described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Of sf interest is Sailor Song (1992), a Near Future tale set around 2020 in a seaside town in Alaska, among whose inhabitants are ...
Monad: Essays on Science Fiction
US critical journal edited by Damon Knight, published irregularly by Pulphouse Publishing. Three issues, September 1990, March 1992 and September 1993. All issues were digest-sized. / This journal was announced in the first issue's editorial as a forum for "s.f. writers" who can uniquely "criticize it from the inside", in contrast to the "fans and academics" who "sometimes publish very foolish things". However, after ...
Smeaton, Oliphant
(1856-1914) Scottish editor and author, in New Zealand and Australia 1878-1893, where most of this fiction was set, including a modestly fantasticated adventure, The Treasure Cave of the Blue Mountains (1898), whose central guide to the hidden horde is a young woman. Smeaton is of sf interest Lost Race tale for boys, A Mystery of the Pacific (1899), though the various protagonists of the tale are all adult: three Englishmen, searching ...
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 ...