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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 ...
Molstad, Stephen
(1960- ) US author of Ties, usually with Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, concentrating on the Independence Day universe, starting with Independence Day (1996), which novelizes Independence Day (1996); he also wrote Godzilla (1998), novelizing Godzilla (1998), which ...
Suspense
US Digest-size magazine. Published by Farrell Publishing Co, Chicago. Edited by Theodore Irwin. Four quarterly issues, Spring 1951 to Winter 1952. / Suspense was based on the CBS Radio series of the same name, which ran for some 945 episodes from 17 June 1942 to 30 September 1962. It included the script of one episode per issue, and also contained a mixture of detective, weird, sf and fantasy stories, including some reprints. The ...
Blom, Suzanne Allés
(1948-2012) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "In the Memory of Prince Edward" for Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction in April 1993; her projected Alternate History series – the first volume, Inca: The Scarlet Fringe (2000), hovers between sf and fantasy modalities – posits an Incan resistance to the Spanish Conquistadores in the fifteenth century. The outcome ...
Information Theory
Claude E Shannon (1916-2001), American mathematician and computer scientist, published work on encoding Communications and articulated fundamental theoretical principles from Mathematics in his paper "A mathematical theory of communication" (July-October 1948 Bell System Technical Journal; in The Mathematical Theory of Communication 1949). The paper defines various key terms including, most interestingly, ...
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 ...