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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 ...
Crittendon, Denise
(? - ) US activist, journalist, editor and author, professionally active from before 1980s; she is of sf interest for her first novel, Where It Rains In Color (2022), set in a portion of the home galaxy occupied by Homo sapiens, on the planet Swazembi, colonized by an African civilization (see Afrofuturism Colonization of Other Worlds; (race in sf); ...
It Came from Beneath the Sea
Film (1955). Clover/Columbia. Produced by Charles H Schneer. Directed by Robert Gordon. Written by George Worthing Yates, Hal Smith, based on a story by Yates. Cast includes Donald Curtis, Faith Domergue and Kenneth Tobey. 77 minutes. Black and white. / In this Monster Movie a giant octopus is affected by atomic radiation – as so often in the genre – and goes on a destructive rampage, attacking San Francisco and demolishing various ...
Airplane Boys
The Wright Brothers' first successful heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk in December 1903 signalled the inevitable death of the Airship Boys subgenre of boys' adventure series before it properly began. Tales involving juvenile chums creating and/or piloting lighter-than-air craft, almost always dirigible Balloons, did not in fact come into the market until Harry Lincoln Sayler published the ...
Anders, Agnetha
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond her authorship of the Pleasurehouse sequence of erotic sf novels, set in a class-ridden Near Future Britain, and comprising Pleasurehouse 13 (1991) and The Last Days of the Pleasurehouse (1992). [JC]
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 ...