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 ...
Mason, Gregory
(1889-1968) US doctor and author whose novel, The Green Gold of Yucatan (1926), is a Lost Race tale, and whose sf Dystopia, The Golden Archer: A Satirical Novel of 1975 (1956), is a Satire depicting an America suffering under regimented, McCarthy-like bigotry and Religious strife. This author should not be confused with Gregory Mason, a pseudonym ...
Aldridge, Alan
(1943-2017) UK artist and author, active from about 1963, initially as an illustrator for The Sunday Times Magazine. He created a number of striking sf covers in his distinctive quasi-psychedelic airbrushed style for Penguin Books, first as a freelance and then as Penguin's art director from 1965 to 1968, when he moved on to his own graphic design company INK. Aldridge's most prolific year at Penguin was 1967, with memorable cover art for J G Ballard's ...
Shand, Daniel
(1989- ) Scottish teacher and author in whose first novel, Fallow (2016), two brothers embark on a hegira through Scotland, with a picaresque shaping to the tale that evokes the supernatural. He is of sf interest for his third novel, Model Citizens (2022), set in a Near Future world where the growing stresses facing Homo sapiens are, perhaps, solved by the issuing/creating of ...
Wright, Austin Tappan
(1883-1931) US corporation lawyer, academic and author; member of an intensely literary family of which figures of interest include his mother, the novelist Mary Tappan Wright (1851-1916), and his grandson, Tappan King [see also The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. His first publication of genre interest was "1915?" for The Atlantic Monthly in 1915, which depicts an unnamed (but ...
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 ...