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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 ...
Heck, Peter J
(1941- ) US author, editor (formerly with Ace Books) and critic who as Peter Heck has written the "On Books" review column for the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction since its June 1994 issue; he has also contributed to Locus and The New York Review of Science Fiction. Solo fiction comprises the Mark Twain Mysteries sequence of historical ...
Berthoud, S Henry
(1804-1891) French editor, amateur academic and author, active from the early 1820s, who gave his first name as Henry for literary work; his first significant book, Contes misanthropiques ["Misanthropic Tales"] (coll 1831), assembles very early examples of the conte cruel, along with various supernatural fictions, sometimes evocative of the work of E T A Hoffmann. Along with examples of this material, stories of some sf interest are ...
Coyle, Harold W
(1952- ) US author who has specialized in Technothrillers hovering at the edge of the Near Future; they include Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III (1987) which – as a Sequel by Another Hand to Sir John Hackett's Third World War novels of the early 1980s – is of interest for the ...
Space Stations
Stories of space stations or artificial satellites appear early in sf, the first example being Edward Everett Hale's extraordinary "The Brick Moon" (October-December 1869 Atlantic Monthly) and its sequel "Life in the Brick Moon" (February 1870 Atlantic), in which the satellite of the title consists of many brick spheres connected by brick arches, and is launched, with people on board, by gigantic flywheels. Kurd ...
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 ...