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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 ...
Lever, Peter
(1972- ) UK editor and author whose first novel, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography (2009) as by Cheeta, is an Apes as Human tale narrated by Cheeta (as impersonated by various chimpanzees in Tarzan Films from 1932), looking back on his life from the age of 76; the poignance of his love for Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984) contrasts, at times savagely, with his Satirical ...
After Earth
US film (2013). Columbia/Overbrook Entertainment/Blinding Edge Pictures. Directed by M Night Shyamalan. Written by Gary Whitta and M Night Shyamalan, based on a story by Will Smith. Cast includes Kristofer Hivju, Zoë Isabella Kravitz, Glenn Morshower, Sophie Okonedo, Jaden Smith and Will Smith. 100 minutes. Colour. / One thousand years in the future, humanity has abandoned Earth to live on another planet after ...
Pier, Garrett Chatfield
(1875-1943) UK-born US author of Hanit the Enchantress (1921), in which a Yale expedition to Egypt discovers what seems to be a Lost World, into the heart of which the lead of the expedition plunges by Timeslip, where he falls in love with the spitting image of the twentieth century woman to whom he is betrothed. [JC]
Murakami Haruki
(1949- ) Japanese author, translator and former jazz bar proprietor, inspired by such Americana as the stories of Richard Brautigan and the Absurdist SF of Kurt Vonnegut. Murakami's laconic prose is thick with American allusions and quite unlike the insular intricacies of earlier Japanese literature. His rambling, pensive characters, often ...
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 ...