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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 ...
Coates, John
(1912-1963) UK playwright and author, not to be confused with the English tenor John Coates (1865-1941); his Tomorrow's Child: A Comedy in Three Acts (performed 1946; 1947 chap) is set in the over-disciplined Near Future society of 1965 Britain. Here Today (1949) is a Time Travel tale about a man who claims to have wooed Jane Austen. [JC]
Neville, Jill
(1932-1997) Australian journalist, playwright and author, mostly in the UK from 1951; she was the sister of Richard Neville (1941-2016), editor of Oz in the 1960s and author of Footprints of the Future: Handbook for the Third Millennium (2002). Neville was not much drawn to sf, though her second novel, The Love-Germ (1969), is an occasionally sharp sf Satire set in the Near Future, which traces the ...
Gollancz
UK publishing house, for many years properly styled Victor Gollancz Ltd, famous (until its sale to the US company Houghton Mifflin in 1990) as one of the last family companies in UK publishing; in 1992 Houghton Mifflin sold the firm to the Cassell group of companies, where it became an imprint; in December 1998 it was acquired by Orion, itself newly purchased by Hachette, and Victor Gollancz soon became Orion's imprint for all sf, fantasy and horror, excepting only some children's genre titles ...
Gaspar, Enrique
(1842-1902) Spanish diplomat, playwright and author, initially of zarzuelas, comic operettas with spoken dialogue in the French manner. He is of sf interest for the book-length "El anacronópete" (in Novelas, coll 1887; trans Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell as The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey 2012) which, although it is not the first text to posit something like Time Travel, seems to be the first to describe ...
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 ...