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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 ...
Swan, Thor
(1903-1978) US author in whose Near Future Satire Furfooze: A Tale Fantastique (1939) the body of an advanced creature from the Ice Age is brought back to life (see Apes as Human). [JC]
Yellow Magazine, The
UK fortnightly general fiction magazine published by Amalgamated Press, London; 130 issues, 23 September 1921 to 17 September 1926, appeared alternate Fridays with The Red Magazine, both edited by John Stock. The magazine was very similar to The Red, though if anything was more light-hearted. For the five years it existed it seemed to siphon away from The Red much of its mystery fiction and science fiction. Many of the same contributors ...
McDonald, Steven E
(1956- ) UK author, now in the US, who began publishing sf with "Empty Barrels" in Analog for June 1978, his best-known story being "Ideologies" (October 1980 Analog), and whose first novel, The Janus Syndrome (1981), put into Space-Opera guise a tale involving racial oppression, romantic exaggerations of material, and masquerades. He then fell silent, though he has more ...
Davis-Goff, Sarah
(? - ) Irish journalist, publisher and author whose first novel, the Young-Adult Last Ones Left Alive (2019), envisions an Ireland at some point in the moderately distant Near Future, at a point where the planetary Disaster – a Zombie apocalypse probably due in particular to scientific research gone wrong, and to ...
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 ...