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 ...
Sims, D N
(1940- ) UK author of two sf novels for Robert Hale Limited: A Plenteous Seed (1973), which depicts upheaval in an ambiguous Utopia or Dystopia; and The Pastime of Eternity (1975), in which an Stellar Council envoy investigates the mysteries of a planet called Midori. [JC/DRL]
Gardner, Martin
(1914-2010) US mathematician, amateur conjuror, journalist and author of many books of popular science, along with several volumes of puzzles and games. In the Name of Science (1952; rev vt Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1957) is an iconoclastic and amusing nonfiction book about Pseudoscience: cults, fads and hoaxes existing on the fringes of science, with chapters on Hollow-Earth and ...
McCay, Winsor
(1867-1934) Canadian-born Comic-strip artist and creator of animated cartoons, in US from an early age; of seminal importance in both his main professions. His earliest years are obscure, but by 1889 he was employed in Chicago as an engraver in a printing firm, when he may have been exposed to the phantasmagoric École des Beaux-Arts Chicago World's Fair of 1893, then under construction. During the 1890s he worked as a freelance poster painter and as an ...
Miller, Walter M, Jr
(1923-1996) US author who before beginning to publish served in World War Two as a pilot, flying combat missions; he then converted to Catholicism, in 1947. Miller began publishing sf with "Secret of the Death Dome" in Amazing in 1951, and over the ten years of his active writing career released about forty more tales, many of which had a deep impact upon the field. During the 1950s, a time when US sf tended to express its new-found interest in character through ...
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 ...