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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 ...
Zinovii, Niko
(? - ) US publisher and author whose sf novel, The God Antenna (2012), is set in a Near Future world facing the challenges of First Contact and the associated problem of coping with a pill (see Drugs) that homes in on the part of the human brain that causes Religion and deletes it. [JC]
Andrews, Arlan, Sr
(1940- ) US engineer, entrepreneur and author, who has published under various modifications of his full name, Dr Arlan Keith Andrews, Sr, and who began to release work of genre interest with "Asimov as a Dirty Old Man" in Sandworm for 1971. His sf tends to be strongly grounded in issues of Technology and to make effective use of the devices and espousals of pragmatism characteristic of Hard SF. Beginning ...
Futurology
The word "futurology" is a neologism coined in 1943 by a refugee German professor of sociology, Ossip K Flechtheim (1909-1998), then teaching in a US college; during the course of his American stay, he met and may have directly influenced Isaac Asimov, who was then beginning to publish the Robot/Foundation Future History that dominated his career, and whose central character, Hari Seldon, creates a ...
Who, The
Highly regarded UK rock band, formed in 1964 by guitarist and songwriter Peter Townshend (1945- ), vocalist Roger Daltrey (1944- ), bassist John Entwhistle (1944-2002) and drummer Keith Moon (1946-1978). The Who's blues and rock grounding is evident in a range of skilfully noisy and slyly affecting songs about teenage disaffection, some of the most enduring in the rock-and-roll canon. But Townshend's ambition from an early stage was to write ...
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 ...