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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 ...
Jay, Victor
Pseudonym of Victor J Banis (1937-2019), who is perhaps best known for transgressive 1960s novels like The Affairs of Gloria (1964), which was unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity by officials in Sioux City, Iowa, and for The Man from C.A.M.P. sequence of gay detective novels. Early pseudonyms include Jay Vickery, under which he wrote one sf novel, Man Into Boy (1968), and the House Name J X ...
Bell, Madison Smartt
(1957- ) US author, most of whose work has been nonfantastic. His second novel Waiting for the End of the World (1985) is, however, an exercise in intermittently postmodern Fantastika (see Postmodernism and SF); its protagonist, who speaks with the devil, plans to explode a nuclear weapon in New York, but instead of accomplishing this goal achieves a ...
Grisewood, R Norman
(1876-1923) UK-born author who emigrated to the USA in 1895 and was naturalized in 1921. He wrote two novels of sf interest. In Zarlah the Martian (1909), an instant Communications device allows an Identity Transfer between a Martian and Earthman, both of whom remain happy in their new bodies, though the Earthman – now long-lived, in an advanced society with Antigravity ...
Southon, Arthur E
(1887-1964) UK minister and author, much of his fiction being adventure tales set in Africa. They include A Yellow Napoleon: A Romance of West Africa (1923), which describes an attempted insurrection in the immediate Near Future; and Jackson's Ju-Ju (1927; vt The God of Gold: A Tale of the West African Coast 1927), a Lost Race novel. [JC]
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 ...