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 ...
Fandom
The active readership of sf and fantasy, maintaining contacts through Fanzines and Conventions. Fandom originated in the late 1920s, shortly after the appearance of the first SF Magazines. Readers contacted each other, formed local groups (some of which, notably the Science Fiction League, were professionally sponsored), and soon began publication of ...
Brookmyre, Christopher
(1968- ) UK author who remains best known for his Jack Parlabane sequence of noir thrillers, beginning with his first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning (1996), and all featuring a very Scottish investigative reporter profoundly at odds with the powers that be. His first tale to contain fantasy elements, Pandaemonium (2009) plays, not entirely successfully, an Equipoisal game with uneasily matched registers of ...
Diaman, N A
(1936-2020) US photographer – as Nikos Diaman – and author of gay sf novels, including Ed Dean Is Queer (1978) and The Fourth Wall (1980), both of which see Near Future America as a Dystopia for homosexuals, though the first ends hopefully; and Private Nation (1997), whose gay protagonists must exist in a world oppressively subject to privatization gone mad. [JC]
Brown, Peter Currell
(1936- ) UK author whose first novel, Smallcreep's Day (1965), at an indeterminate point in the twentieth century, contains an extremely effective Absurdist quest into the heart of a vast, palpably allegorical factory, though the book as a whole is somewhat scattershot; the notion that the result of the quest for meaning is another assembly line is never sufficiently brought into focus. Mike Rutherford, the guitarist/bassist ...
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 ...