SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Miller, John J
(1954-2022) US author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Comes a Hunter" in Wild Cards (anth 1987) edited by George R R Martin, followed shortly by his first Tie, Buck Rogers: First Power Play (1990), part of the Buck Rogers: The Inner Planets Trilogy subseries. He also contributed to the Ray Bradbury Presents sequence [see Checklist below]. His two ...
Space [game]
Videogame (1979). EduWare Services (EW). Designed by Steven Pederson, Sherwin Steffin. Platforms: AppleII. / Space was the first science-fictional Computer Role Playing Game to be made available commercially. The game was very much influenced by Traveller (1977), to the extent that both it and its sequel were removed from sale in 1982 following a lawsuit by Game ...
Sleeper Awakes
As the nineteenth century progressed and the planet became more and more thoroughly explored, authors of Utopias and Dystopias began to abandon present-day Lost Worlds and Islands as venues for their ideal societies, and instead to locate their speculations in the future, perhaps hundreds of years hence. Almost always these speculations were framed by prologues (and sometimes ...
Valigursky, Ed
(1926-2009) Working name of American artist Edward Valigursky, sometimes credited as such or simply as Valigursky; on a few occasions, he used the pseudonym William Rembach. After artistic training at the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Academy of Arts, and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, he began working as an associate art director for Ziff-Davis in 1952, became art director for Quinn Publishing in the following year, and moved into freelance work two ...
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 ...