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 ...
Larson, Ellen
(1953- ) US editor and author whose debut novel The Hatch and Brood of Time (1999) is a nonfantastic mystery not listed below. Her first sf novel, The Measure of the Universe (2002), follows the eventually romantic interactions of a human and a visiting Alien archaeologist who meet on a Greek Island during the course of his attempts to recover for his species the literal art of writing (see ...
Talbot, Bryan
(1952- ) UK Comics artist and author, a prolific and at times excitingly experimental author/artist of much work since the beginning of the 1970s. After the nature of comics, most of his work escapes realistic trammels as with the material assembled as Bryan Talbot's Brainstorm: The Complete Chester P Hackenbush and Other Underground Classics (various original works here assembled; graph coll 1982). In ...
Risk 2210 AD
Board Game (2001). Avalon Hill (AH). Designed by Craig Van Ness, Rob Daviau. / Risk 2210 is an excellent example of a game that is easy to learn and hard to master. The rules are a variant of those in Risk (1957 Miro as La Conquete de Monde) designed by Albert Lamorisse, a highly abstract representation of the Napoleonic wars which encourages the formation of rapidly shifting alliances between players. In Risk 2210's ...
Merrill, James
(1926-1995) US author and poet whose two novels are nonfantastic, as is most of his poetry, which is of the highest calibre, and justifies his ranking as one of the most important American poets of his century. He is of indirect but significant sf interest, and may be deemed a central figure of twentieth-century Fantastika, for The Changing Light at Sandover (omni 1982) [see Checklist for details of component parts], a sustained 17,000 line verse ...
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 ...