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 ...
Fisher, Philip M, Jr
(1891-1973) US teacher, naval officer, author and financial auditor (in that order), whose work was restricted primarily to the Pulp magazines. His earliest sale was an article in Youth's Companion in 1916; his first fiction sale, and also his first work of sf, was "The Demise of Professor Manried" for All-Story Weekly, 18 August 1917. Here the eponymous professor is able to use electricity to amplify and harness thought ...
Crawford, Chris
(1950- ) US Game designer, important in the early years of commercial Videogame development and subsequently noted for his distaste for the direction taken by the industry. Crawford was an enthusiastic player of board and counter Wargames who went on to design many of the seminal Computer Wargames, including Tanktics (1976) – his ...
Frezza, Robert
(1956- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Max Weber's War" for Amazing, January 1987. The Small Colonial War sequence – comprising A Small Colonial War (1990), Fire in a Faraway Place (1994) and Cain's Land (1996) – replays the Boer War on a colony planet dominated by a Japanese-run interstellar empire, though without Kaffirs. The Imperial Japanese military forces, predictably, ...
Lederer, William J
(1912-2009) US soldier and author, most famous for a nonfantastic novel, The Ugly American (1958) with Eugene L Burdick. Of sf interest is Sarkhan (1965; vt The Deceptive American 1977) with Eugene L Burdick, a Near Future tale set in the fictional South-East Asian state of Sarkhan featured in The Ugly American, and now subject to Communist ...
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 ...