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 ...
Pandemic
A plague is a disease that travels from somewhere else. Many afflictions which are difficult to transmit, like leprosy, or the legion of cancers, are not normally described here, therefore, even loosely, as plagues, and are not treated in this encyclopedia under the Pandemic heading, a term here applied to contagions that invade. Various pestilences – including bubonic or pneumonic plague – do of course meet that loose criterion. Their pedigree is deep; invasive plagues have ...
Reynolds, Joseph
(? - ) US author of Sex novels with sf elements, including Satan's Disciple (1968) and Operation Sextrip (1970). [JC]
Dyer, Alfred
(? - ) UK author known only for two unremarkable sf adventures for Robert Hale Limited: The Symbiotic Mind (1980) and The Gabriel Inheritance (1981). [JC]
Harrison, Troon
(1958- ) Canadian author, initially of picture books for children, more recently of Young Adult novels; she is deft with horses. The Tales of Terre sequence [see Checklist] is fantasy. Of sf interest is Eye of the Wolf (2003), set in a Dystopian North America a century hence as it faces a new Ice Age, the young protagonist, whose mother has been inveigled into the warm South, experiences ...
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 ...