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.
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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 ...
Computer Role Playing Game
Term used to describe a form of Videogame derived from pen and paper Role Playing Games. This entry only deals with the single player variant; the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, a related form in which many individuals share the same virtual world, is considered under Online Worlds. Computer Role Playing Games ...
Sternberg, Jacques
(1923-2006) Belgian author who published fiction until the end of the century, though sf made up a decreasingly portion of his work; he moved at the end of his life to the memoir form. A particularly idiosyncratic author with a keen sense of the absurd, he built from the early 1950s a unique body of work, often only tenuously linked to sf, often structured as Satires where everyday situations logically degenerate into darkly humorous nightmares, his first novel being ...
Shepherd, Megan
(1982- ) US author of the ongoing Madman's Daughter sequence comprising to date The Madman's Daughter (2013) and Her Dark Curiosity (2014), a Sequel by Other Hands to H G Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), though with a paranormal romance tonality, accompanied by an intense focus upon the Young Adult heroine, ...
Glemser, Bernard
(1908-1990) UK photographer, art editor and author who worked for the UK government in America after 1945, remaining in the US after his resignation; he also published one novel as by Robert Crane and at least two romances as by Geraldine Napier. Glemser began to publish work of some genre interest with "Astonished Father" in the British journal Argosy for December 1945, though his first outright sf story, as by Crane, was "The Purple Fields" in ...
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 ...