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 ...
Anonymous SF Authors
This rubric covers the authors of works which, in their first edition, appeared with no indication of authorship whatsoever, and any in which authorship is indicated only by a row of asterisks or some similar symbol; cases where authorship has never been ascertained are discussed in the author entry for Anonymous. Works attributed to "the author of ..." are considered anonymous only if the work referred to is itself anonymous. Cases where subsequent editions reveal ...
Herbert, A P
(1890-1971) UK humorist, author and politician – an Independent MP from 1935 to 1950. He was prolific for 60 years after he began publishing light verse in Punch, some of it fantastic, around 1910. From 1917 his Punch work was signed A.P.H. The Secret Battle (1919) – a nonfantastic novel about the judicial murder by the British army of an officer whose tactical savvy is misinterpreted by his privileged senior – reflected the ...
Cornett, Robert
(1952-2022) US author who saw military service and also worked inter alia as paramedic, firefighter, postal worker, private investigator, and academic. He began to publish work of genre interest with Remember the Alamo? (1980; vt Remember the Alamo! 1986) as Robert Charles Cornett in collaboration with Kevin D Randle, opening the Time Mercenaries sequence of Military SF involving ...
Rolt-Wheeler, Francis W
Working name of UK author Francis William Wheeler (1876-1960), in US and Canada circa 1900-1925, later in Tunis and Nice; in his early career he specialized in stories for boys, though in his later years – after a spectacular 1915 divorce which led to his imprisonment – he turned to the kind of religious investigation, including forays into Theosophy, that characterized the career of his sister, Ethel Rolt Wheeler (1869-1958) (both siblings added ...
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 ...