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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 ...
Guo Xiaolu
(1973- ) Chinese-born author and filmmaker, in London from 2002, whose early work occasionally touches on sf (see Equipoise). Born after the Cultural Revolution and graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, her prose presents a twenty-first century that both is and isn't the wondrous future promised by the earlier sf of China. Guo's work can hence be parsed as China's answer to the "Gernsback Continuum" espoused by ...
Jarre, Jean Michel
(1948- ) French composer and performer of electronic synthesizer pieces. There is no explicit sf content to the instrumental suites Oxygene (1976), Equinoxe (1978) and Les Chants Magnétiques (1981) but it is hard to escape the sense that these bleepy, throbbing, soaring soundscapes are aural SF. Jarre is certainly fascinated by space. The last track of Rendez-Vous (1986), "La Derniere Rendez-Vous" is dedicated ...
Zito, V M
(? - ) US advertising agency executive and author of The Return Man (2012), a Near Future Post-Holocaust novel set in the Evacuated States of western America four years after the now traditional Zombie holocaust has split America apart: gonzo zombies out West, which has become a no-man's-land, while the Safe States back East have been crushed into ...
Buck Rogers XXVC
Role Playing Game (1990). Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Designed by Mike Cook, Michael Dobson, Jeff Grubb, Jim Ward, Warren Spector, Jeff Butler. / Buck Rogers was perhaps the first in the line of quintessentially American mass market Space Opera heroes which continued through Flash Gordon, E E Smith's ...
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 ...