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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 ...
Charbonneau, Louis
(1924-2017) US journalist and author who also wrote nonfantastic Westerns as by Carter Travis Young; after writing some radio plays at the end of the 1940s, he worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times (1952-1971), beginning to publish sf novels with No Place on Earth (1958), about a coercive Dystopia. He produced sf for several years thereafter, publishing: Corpus Earthling (1960), about ...
Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan
(1933-2019) Scottish author who also worked in advertising and publishing; he was best known for biographies and works of social history. His many books include some of genre interest, such as Chameleon (1967), a fantasy about a Shapeshifting executive in an oil company, The Centre of the Universe Is 18 Baedekerstrasse (coll 1985), the title novella of which is sf, and Particle Theory: A Novel (1996), a surreal ...
Van Gelder, Gordon
(1966- ) US editor, publisher and author who published his first story "Santa's Tenth Reindeer" in 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (anth 1984) edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr and Martin H Greenberg, though the majority of his career has been spent as an editor. After a brief internship at Bluejay Books in 1986, ...
McWilliams, Kelly
(circa 1989- ) US author whose second novel, the Young Adult Agnes at the End of the World (2020), follows its protagonist from her upbringing, in a Near Future Dystopian Keep-like enclave dominated by a fundamentalist cleric (see Religion), into the larger world beyond, which seems about to succumb to a ...
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 ...