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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 ...
Greenwood, Gary
(? - ) UK small-press author in whose first novel The Dreaming Pool (1998) a South Wales underachiever is threatened by ghosts, a secret society and an H P Lovecraft-style Thing; an early hint at extra-terrestrial incomers (see Aliens) leaves the true nature of events around the titular pool suitably unresolved. Greenwood's distinctive mix of sf, ...
Two Women of the West
Joint pseudonym of Alice Ilgenfritz Jones (1846-1906) and Ella Robinson Merchant (1857-1916) for their sf Satire, Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance (1893), whose male narrator, after flying to Mars in an "aeroplane" – a very early appearance of the word in English – discovers there a Utopia based on Gender reversal (see Feminism; ...
Givins, Robert C
(1845-1915) Canadian-born real estate developer (including a castle for himself in South Chicago) and author, in US from an early age; his romances were sometimes published as by Snivig C Trebor (his name spelled backwards). His one sf novel, A Thousand Miles an Hour (1913), might stand as a compendium of misunderstood science – examples being the concept of an aeroplane whose vertical screw allows it to remain still while the world turns, and the notion that ...
Dryden, J L
(? -? ) US author of book-length sf poem about Atlantis, Mona: Queen of Lost Atlantis: An Idyllic Re-embodiment of Long Forgotten History (1925), which traces the rise and fall of the great Island. [JC]
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 ...