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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 ...
Vaughn, S K
Pseudonym of an unidentified American (? - ) screenwriter and author of thrillers, whose sf debut under this name is Across the Void (2019), a Space Opera whose protagonist awakens, apparently suffering from Memory Edit or perhaps straightforward trauma, as her NASA-built ship is broken and she is alone, except expectedly for an attendant AI. Her task is ...
Lee, Chang-rae
(1965- ) South Korean-born author, in US from infancy; the complexity of this background is reflected in his first and best-known novel, Native Speaker (1995), and underlies much of his succeeding work, none of it with any fantastic content until On Such a Full Sea (2014), a Dystopia set in a moderately distant Near Future America, in the ...
Time Opera
A potentially useful item of Terminology which has yet to be generally adopted. It seems to have been coined by Anthony Boucher in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, first as a description of Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time (May-July 1938 Astounding; rev 1952) in "Recommended Reading" (April 1953 ...
Andrews, Lewis M
(1946- ) US author whose only genre novel is Gomorrah (1974) with Marvin Karlins, an sf crime thriller set in a nightmarishly transformed New York of the Near Future. [DRL]
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 ...