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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 ...
Hoskin, Rik
(? - ) Author who under the House Name James Axler has contributed to the very lengthy Deathlands sequence of Ruined Earth sf and – several times – to the also long and roughly similar in background Outlanders sequence. Both are discussed in more detail in the entry for James Axler. [DRL]
DeMarinis, Rick
(1934-2019) US author whose first novel, A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of Claude Rains and Dr Tellenbeck (1975), applies a sharply fabulistic eye (see Fabulation) to Southern California through the lens of a revisionist take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols), though in this case the ...
Alton, Andrea I
(1946- ) US author whose Demon of Undoing (1988), set on a planet dominated by a Cat-like Alien civilization, describes the initially uneasy but ultimately effective rapport between a crippled member of Clan Fen and the human Sig, a surviving member of an expedition whose long-ago impact on the rigidly honour-bound stratified Inkairans had been destabilizing, and who are now remembered as the Demons of ...
Wells, Barry
Pseudonym of UK author Horace Arthur Richards (1911-1971), author of one sf Tie of interest, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), novelizing the Disaster film The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) [which see]. This novel resolves the film's cliffhanger ending (will the news headline be "World Saved" or "World Doomed"?) on its final page, when the rains do come and ...
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 ...