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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 ...
Battlezone
Videogame (1998). Activision. Platforms: Win; rev vt Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs, N64 (2000); Amiga (2001). / Battlezone is an innovative Real Time Strategy game, inspired by the largely unrelated arcade tank combat game Battlezone (1980 Atari, Arcade, Others) designed by Ed Rotberg. Its gameplay uses a three-dimensional first person view to combine the physical ...
Wager, Walter
(1924-2004) US crime and spy-thriller author who also wrote as John Tiger and (his first and second names) Walter Herman. His borderline-sf political suspense thriller Viper Three (1971), in which escaped prisoners take over a US nuclear missile silo and blackmail the government with threats of a launch that will trigger World War Three, was adapted for Cinema with a somewhat different slant and ending as ...
Golding, William
(1911-1993) UK teacher and author, who published a pre-World War Two book of Poems (coll 1934), but remained a provincial schoolmaster until the publication of his first and best-known novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), later filmed twice as Lord of the Flies (1963, 1990). It is the superficially simple story of a group of schoolchildren trapped on an Island when their plane is shot down ...
Dixie, Florence
(1855-1905) UK traveller, journalist (the first female war correspondent in the English language) and author whose nonfiction Across Patagonia: A Lady Combs the Pampas (1880) – the only woman in her party, she was its dominant figure – captures something of her Feminist urgency. In Gloriana, or The Revolution of 1900 (1890) a woman disguised as a man is elected Prime Minister of the UK and, though unmasked, establishes full ...
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 ...