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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 ...
Kress, Nancy
(1948- ) US author, married to Charles Sheffield from 1998 until his death in 2002 and married to Jack Skillingstead from 2011; she also writes as by Anna Kendall. She began publishing sf with "The Earth Dwellers" in Galaxy for December 1976, though her first novels were fantasies like The Prince of Morning Bells (1981), a quest tale during which, ...
Aphelion
1. Australian magazine, Summer 1985/6 to Summer 1986/7, five issues, edited by Peter McNamara (1947-2004) from Adelaide, A4-size, quarterly on coated stock. One of many short-lived, quixotic Australian attempts to produce a viable professional sf magazine, Aphelion soon failed, but honourably. Good stories by George Turner, Greg Egan, Rosaleen Love and, most often, Terry ...
Meredith, Edgar
(? -? ) UK author of a Scientific Romance, Our Stranger: A Kinemato-Romance (1936), in which the Time theories of J W Dunne are used to shape the relationship between the evolving human race, as depicted in the London of 1971, and their mentors, who inhabit a Utopia in the ...
Williams, Francis
Working name of UK journalist and author Edward Francis Williams, Baron Francis-Williams (1903-1970); a working newspaperman from 1920; he was dismissed from his editorship of the London Daily Herald in 1940 for refusing to abate his long-held anti-Nazi fervour; from 1941 he served as controller of press and censorship. His sf novel, The Richardson Story (1951; vt It Happened Tomorrow 1952), deals with an ominous Near Future ...
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 ...