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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 ...
Lydston, G Frank
(1858-1923) US medical doctor specializing in urology; his experiments in sex gland transplants precede those more famous Serge Voronoff; more remarkably, he performed his first transplantation on himself. A prolific author of nonfiction in his speciality, his occasional fiction includes Over the Hookah: The Tales of a Talkative Doctor (coll of linked stories 1896), in which a series of medical anecdotes, several of them sf, are told within a ...
Waugh, Charles G
(1943- ) US college professor, anthologist and author, most of whose work up to 2002 – 193 titles all told – was in collaboration with Martin H Greenberg, either alone or with further collaborators. These included such "name" authors as Robert Adams, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Isaac ...
Swayne, Martin
Pseudonym of Scottish-born UK psychiatrist and author Henry Maurice Dunlop Nicoll (1884-1953), who wrote nonfiction as Maurice Nicoll; he served through World War One as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Gallipoli and elsewhere. Some of his stories – like "The Sleep Beam" (March 1918 Strand), in which the eponymous Ray stops the Germans from sleeping and thereby they surrender, ...
Shimerman, Armin
(1949- ) US actor and author, best known in the former capacity for his role as the Ferengi bartender named Quark in the Television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999); his first novel, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The 34th Rule (1999) with David R George III, is based on Quark. His Merchant Prince sequence beginning ...
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 ...