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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 ...
Brack, Vektis
A House Name used on three sf novels for Gannet Press of London in the early 1950s. The author or authors responsible for the first two are not identified: The "X" People (1953), which concerns an Alien Invasion, and Castaway from Space (1953), about an alien crashlanding, are both unremarkable; as is Odyssey in Space (1953), which concerns ...
Portal
Videogame (1986). Nexa Corporation. Designed by Rob Swigart. Platforms: Amiga, AppleII, AtariST, C64, Mac, PCBoot. / Portal was an attempt to create a "computer novel", a form that was intended to more closely resemble that of hyperfiction (see Hypertext) than that of the text Adventure. The player takes the part of an astronaut sent on a solitary mission ...
Davy, Humphry
(1778-1829) English scientist and author famous for inventing the miner's safety-lamp in 1815; knighted 1812, baronet 1818, President of the Royal Society 1820. In his youth he was an acquaintance of the romantic poets of the day: a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped correct the proofs of Coleridge's and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (coll 1798), and some of his own poems were included in an anthology edited by Robert Southey. His last work, ...
Brissett, Jennifer Marie
(1969- ) London-born software engineer and author, in USA from the age of four, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Executioner" in Warrior Wisewoman 2 (anth 2009) edited by Roby James. The apparent over-complicatedness of her first novel, Elysium (2014), dissolves in the unpacking of the intricate but lucid story, which is initially set in an unnamed (but identifiable) version of New York, where a ...
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 ...