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 ...
Spain
Mostly influenced by Jules Verne and Camille Flammarion, Spanish nineteenth-century Proto SF featured four voyage-to-the-Moon tales, beginning with the anonymous didactic utopia Viage de un filósofo a Selenópolis ["Selenopolis"] (1804); Joaquín Castillo y Mayone's oneiric story Zulema y Lambert ["Zulema and Lambert"] ...
Fawcett, E Douglas
(1866-1960) UK author and mystical thinker, long resident in Switzerland. His first (and best-known) sf novel, Hartmann the Anarchist, or The Doom of the Great City (June-September 1893 The English Illustrated Magazine; 1893), illustrated by Fred T Jane, features a 1920 anarchist revolution against a wicked, capitalist UK, with London being destroyed by Airships; but, in the face of ...
Shimmin, Graeme
(1967- ) UK author whose first novel, A Kill in the Morning (2014), is a Hitler Wins tale set in an Alternate History 1955 Britain and Europe, the Jonbar Point being the death of Winston Churchill in 1941, after which World War Two ends in a draw. The story itself is a thriller ...
Egleton, Clive
(1927-2006) UK soldier and author who began to publish novels with the Garnett sequence – A Piece of Resistance (1970; rev vt Never Surrender 2004), Last Post for a Partisan (1971) and The Judas Mandate (1972) – about UK Post-Holocaust resistance to the Russians who occupy the islands after nuclear war; in the end, a government-in-exile is formed and the invaders, drained by a China ...
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 ...