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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 ...
Bisbee, Eugene Shade
(1864-1933) US author whose first work of sf interest is "A Hundred Thousand Dollar Trance" for The Black Cat in 1896, though it is in fact about a hoax involving hypnotism; The Treasure of the Ice (1898) is a Lost Race tale set at the south pole, where a civilization of waif Greeks has flourished, partly due to Eugenics; there is little argument in the text about such matters, ...
Peel, Charles Victor Alexander
(1869-1931) UK big-game hunter and author, known mostly for martial descriptions of his exploits; of sf interest is The Ideal Island: A Romance (1927), in which a number of nubile young couples establish on an uncharted Island a Utopia one of whose precepts is universal nudity. Peel founded a museum in Oxford to mount his trophies. [JC]
Gibbons, Floyd
(1887-1939) US author, mostly of war stories; well known as a war correspondent. The Red Napoleon (6 April-3 August 1929 Liberty; 1929) is a Future War tale in which a Mongol dictator named Karakhan, Communist successor to the murdered Stalin, conquers much of the world, miscegenating as he goes – like Genghis Khan (circa 1162-1227) before him – this time as part of a deliberate onslaught upon the ...
Hagio Moto
(1949- ) Japanese artist, often described as the "founding mother" of modern Japanese comics for girls, regarded, along with Keiko Takemiya, as the epicentre of the Year 24 Group of influential female Manga creators (see Women SF Writers). Much of the style of Hagio's early output was born from her attempts to ...
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 ...