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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 ...
Piller, Emanuel S
(1907-1985) US author, US editor, journalist and author, with Leonard Engel, of one of the very first Cold War Future War novels, The World Aflame: The Russian-American War of 1950 (1947), in which America's control of the air – and use of that preponderance in a nuclear first strike – proves insufficient to crush Russia, nor does a subsequent use of ...
Chafe, Paul
(1965- ) Canadian author and army reserve officer who began to publish work of genre interest with "Prisoner of War" in Man-Kzin Wars VII (anth 1995) edited by Larry Niven; he went on to produce the first full-length novel in the Man-Kzin Wars Shared World sequence, Destiny's Forge (2006). Mission Critical: Death of the Phoenix (1996) is a ...
Higgins, Peter
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Original Word for Rain" in Zahir for Spring 2006, a fantasy. Of some sf interest is Wolfhound Century (2013), a Near Future Urban Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] which begins the projected Vissarion Lom sequence. Lom, a ...
Wilson, Robert
(? - ) US author whose Science Fantasy tale Tentacles of Dawn (1978) is set mostly in a terrifying Underground world, from which its protagonist – who may have been transported there via Time Travel – eventually escapes (see Pocket Universe). [JC]
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 ...