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 ...
Cogswell, Theodore R
(1918-1987) US author and academic, who claimed to have been a teenaged ambulance driver on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He began publishing sf in June 1952 with what proved to be one of his most successful stories, "The Specter General" for Astounding. In this long, amusing tale – much in the vein Keith Laumer was later to make his own – a long-forgotten maintenance division of the Galactic Protectorate ...
Maurice, Michael
Pseudonym of UK clergyman, teacher and author Conrad Arthur Skinner (1889-1975), whose sf novel Not in Our Stars (1923) can be forgiven its confused science – giant meteorites are supposed to cause perturbations in spacetime, Time Distortions sufficient to reverse its flow for the protagonist – because of the odd intensity of the tale. Awakening in a death cell after a meteor strike, he is executed and then begins to relive his life ...
Jakes, John
(1932-2023) US author initially best known for sf and fantasy, under his own name and various pseudonyms including Alan Henry, Jacob Johns, Alan Payne, Jay Scotland and Alan Wilder, before launching his Bicentennial series of novels, which traces the fictional history of a US family over the past 200 years. It achieved extraordinary bestsellerdom, undoubtedly justifying, at least financially, his decision to retire from the genre. Most of his shorter work, beginning with "The Dreaming ...
Chronomaster
Videogame (1995). DreamForge Entertainment. Designed by Roger Zelazny, Jane Lindskold. Platforms: DOS. / The graphical Adventure game Chronomaster was Roger Zelazny's last work. In a future galactic civilization, the creation of privately owned Pocket Universes has become a hobby ...
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 ...