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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 ...
Chester, George Randolph
(1870-1924) US screenwriter and author, married to Lillian Chester, his close collaborator from the time of their marriage in 1911; the sexist conventions of the time treated him as the senior partner, but his references to her seem to contradict this. His (or their) The Jingo (1912) satirizes simultaneously the lost-race (see Lost Worlds) story and US know-how in a tale about a salesman selling his modern ...
Johannesson, Olof
Pseudonym of Swedish plasma physicist and author Hannes Olof Gosta Alfvén (1908-1995), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics, which may have surprised some of his more conventional colleagues as he had been for many years thought of as a maverick. His Scientific Romance, Sagan om den stora datamaskinen (1966; trans Naomi Walford as The Big Computer: A Vision ...
Battlefield Earth
Film (2000). Warner Bros presents a Franchise Pictures and Morgan Creek Productions film in association with Battlefield Productions, JTP Films and Mel's Cite du Cinema. Directed by Roger Christian. Written by Corey Mandell and J D Shapiro, based on the first half of the novel Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (1982) by L Ron Hubbard. Cast includes Kim Coates, Sabine Karsenti, Michael MacRae, Barry Pepper, Kelly Preston, John ...
Scientific Detective Monthly
US letter-size magazine; ten monthly issues, January to October 1930, published from New York by Techni-Craft Publishing Co; edited by Hugo Gernsback, with Arthur B Reeve as editorial consultant. It was a sister magazine to Science Wonder Stories (see Wonder Stories) and Air Wonder Stories. From issue #6 it was retitled ...
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 ...