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 ...
Evans, Henry Ridgely
(1861-1949) US amateur magician, journalist and author, much of whose career was spent investigating (and in general debunking) occult lore and religious bodies, including Theosophy. Edgar Allan Poe and Baron von Kempelen's Chess-Playing Automaton (1939) analyses the famous chess-playing machine (operated in fact by a human inside the apparatus), which Edgar Allan Poe speculated about in an essay, "Maelzel's Chess ...
Vertex
US magazine, in Slick letter-size saddle-stapled format, April 1973 to April 1975, and tabloid format June 1975-August 1975. 16 issues, 13 bimonthly, the last three monthly, published by Mankind Publishing, Los Angeles; edited by Donald J Pfeil. Subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction", Vertex was a magazine of imaginative layout and much internal illustration, the first real Slick magazine in the ...
Benni, Stefano
(1947- ) Italian journalist and author who published several nonfiction books before releasing his first novel, Terra! (1983; trans Annapaoloa Cancogni 1985), set in a Post-Holocaust world racked by Nuclear Winter; the action moves from the Underground city of Paris to a race through space to occupy a new and Edenic planet. Governing the farcical ...
Annihilation
Film (2018). Paramount Pictures in association with Netflix presents a DNA Films, Scott Rudin Productions and Skydance Media production. Directed by Alex Garland. Written by Garland, adapted from the novel Annihilation (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer, which with Authority (2014) and Acceptance (2014) forms Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy (omni 2014). Cast includes ...
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 ...