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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Read, Herbert
(1893-1968) UK poet, anarchist and prolific critic of art, literature and politics. His only novel, The Green Child: A Romance (1935) was inspired by the twelfth-century legend of the Green Children of Woolpit, two greenish-skinned children who wandered into a British village and claimed to have come from an underground world called "St. Martin's Land" [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The novel is a ...
Atom, The
A DC Comics Superhero. The original 1940s version of the hero was simply a short man without superpowers who like many of his era decided to fight crime by putting on a colourful costume and punching out evildoers. But when the character was recreated by Gardner F Fox in the 1960s, undoubtedly inspired by the success of another diminutive hero from the 1940s, ...
Savile, Frank
(1865-1950) UK author who began his writing career under the alias Knarf Elivas (his own names reversed) with John Ship, Mariner (1898), an historical nautical adventure set at the time of the Spanish Armada. His next novel, The Foray of the "Hendrik Hudson" (1898), the first under his own name, is a non-fantasy involving a treasure hunt across Russia and Finland in search of a Viking hoard. This sequence of nautical tales ended in a fully-fledged fantastic ...
de Listonai, Mr
Attributed pseudonym of French author Daniel Jost de Villeneuve, whose full name may have been Daniel Jost de Villeneuve de Listonai (17??-17??); his Proto SF tale, Le Voyageur Philosophe dans un Pays Inconnu aux Inhabitants de la Terre (1761 2vols; trans Brian Stableford as The Philosophic Voyager in an Island Unknown to the Inhabitants of Earth 2015), carries its protagonist by space ship to the ...
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 ...