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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
de Lint, Charles
(1951- ) Canadian musician and author – born in the Netherlands but in Canada from early infancy – who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Fane of the Gray Rose" in Swords Against Darkness IV (anth 1979) edited by Andrew J Offutt, and who has become one of the most significant, and almost certainly the most prolific, Canadian fantasy authors. In early years he published ...
Buckle, Richard
(1916-2001) UK music critic who specialized in ballet, and author of a fantasticated Utopia, John Innocent at Oxford: A Fantasy (1939), which depicts a late-twentieth-century Oxford (and hence Britain) as though Max Beerbohm or Ronald Firbank had dreamed it – extravagant, witty, class-obsessed, boneless – all hilariously rendered. It may well be the last "irresponsible" pastoral utopia published before ...
Croly, George
(1780-1860) Irish clergyman, High Tory controversialist, playwright and author, in England from 1810; his novel of Immortality and the Wandering Jew, Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future (1828 3vols; vt Salathiel the Immortal; a History 1855; vt Tarry Thou Till I Come; or, Salathiel the Wandering Jew 1901), was published anonymously but soon acknowledged. The novel ...
Krol, Torsten
(? - ) Australian author, whose reclusiveness has led to unconfirmed speculations that Torsten Krol is a pseudonym. His first novel, The Dolphin People (2006) skirts the fantastic in its depiction of the extreme behaviour of a German family (including at least one war criminal) whose plane has crashed in the Amazonian jungle just after World War Two, and who must convince the tribe that discovers them that ...
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 ...