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 ...
MacAulay, L
(? -? ) UK author of The Decadence: An Excerpt from "A History of the Triumph and Decay of England": Dateable 1949 (1929), most of whose focus is on issues of free trade, which is advocated. [JC]
Nodaway, Max
(? -? ) US author of a Lost Race tale, Rollo in Hawaii: A Tale of Thrilling Adventures, Amid Volcanoes, Fire Fountains and Tropical Wonderlands; Into which is Woven a Vivid Description of those Mystic Isles, Where Fire and Water have Built up a Delirium of Chaos and Beauty (1908). [JC]
Janin, Jules
(1804-1874) French author, active from the 1820s, who first came to prominence for L'Âne mort et la Femme guillotinée (1829; trans Terry Hale as The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman 1993), a very early example of what would become known as the conte cruel [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In its counterintuitive lightheartedness – the plot of the tale is ...
Schneider, Isidor
(1896-1977) US journalist, poet and author, who also served as Literary Editor of the left-wing journal New Masses in the 1930s and 1940s; of sf interest is Doctor Transit (1925) as by I S, an Identity Exchange tale in which a young married couple, unhappy with their native genders, explore the coefficient of Sex in human relations by persuading the eponymous Scientist to operate on ...
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 ...