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 ...
Phillips, Tony
A House Name used for the Turbo Cowboys sequence of Post-Holocaust tales for Ballantine Books. Designed for the Young Adult market, the series – which begins with Turbo Cowboys #1: Jump Start (1988) and ends with Turbo Cowboys #10: City of Glass (1990) – emphasizes the proactive friendship among the four young ...
Grant, John
(1949-2020) Pseudonym of Scottish author and editor Paul Barnett, long resident in England and from 1999 in the USA. Under his own name he wrote the lightweight Strider Chronicles, a Space Opera sequence comprising Strider's Galaxy (1997) and Strider's Universe (1998), plus some ephemeral books, a handful of essays and reviews, and a nonfiction book translation. As Eve Devereux he published several works of nonfiction, chiefly ...
Horler, Sydney
(1888-1954) UK journalist – active from about 1905 – and author, most of whose 150 novels are thrillers, all of them published between 1916 and 1955. Some of these tales incorporate sf elements in the form of fantastic Inventions and/or McGuffins, as for instance in the early Curse of Doone (1928), in which a German spy impersonates a vampire who might in fact exist, while simultaneously an sf ...
Inklings, The
Oxford University-based reading circle and discussion group, active from the early 1930s to 1949, which encouraged the writing of Fantasy. Its best known members are C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and Charles Williams; others with entries in this encyclopedia are Owen Barfield and Roger Lancelyn ...
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 ...