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.
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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 ...
Albedo One
Irish low-paying magazine of sf, fantasy and horror fiction which appears irregularly; formerly two or three times per year, latterly once or twice; there was a three-year gap between issue #47 in 2016 and #48 in 2019. First issue, Summer 1993, but undated from issue #4. Originally published by Tachyon Productions, Dublin, Eire, as an A5 booklet, the publisher became Albedo One Productions, Dublin, from issue #12 (1996), and it switched to A4 format. Digital copies in PDF format have also been ...
Brooks, Byron A
(1845-1911) US inventor (he invented the shift key for the typewriter) and author of Earth Revisited (1893), a Sleeper Awakes tale which espouses a somewhat garbled revision of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888); the reawakened protagonist, after falling in love with his nurse, realizes that she is the Reincarnation of a lost love. All ends well. [JC]
Beere, Peter
(1951- ) UK author whose Trauma 2020 sequence of twenty-first-century action thrillers – comprising Trauma 2020: Urban Prey (1984), Trauma 2020: Book 2: The Crucifixion Squad (1984) and Trauma 2020: Book 3: Silent Slaughter (1985) – has some efficient moments at the depiction of urban Dystopia; his Underworld sequence – comprising Underworld (1992), ...
Welcome, S Byron
(1861-1948) US engineer, inventor and author of From Earth's Center: A Polar Gateway Message (1894), a Lost World tale whose protagonists descend into a Symmes-style Hollow Earth, where they discover an English-speaking country called Centralia, a Utopia where laissez-faire capitalism is luckily controlled by some mixed socialistic joint ownership ...
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 ...