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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 ...
Offenbach, Jacques
(1819-1880) German-born composer of over 100 operas, operettas and other musical pieces; in France from 1833, naturalized 1860. He is recorded here mainly for Le Voyage dans la lune (1875), an opéra bouffe (strictly speaking it is an opéra féerie) adaptation of Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune (1865). "Adaptation" ought to be understood, here, somewhat loosely. Although Offenbach and his ...
SF Horizons
UK critical journal edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, with Tom Boardman acting as business manager. Digest-sized; two 64pp issues only, Spring 1964 and Winter 1965. An early attempt to establish a serious critical sf journal – and as such a precursor of Foundation – SF Horizons carried critical articles ...
Pflug, Ursula
(1958- ) Tunisian born author, raised in Canada, who began to publish work of interest with "Memory Lapse at The Waterfront" (in New Bodies: A Collection of Science Fiction, anth 1981, ed anon), which was assembled, with other speculative fictions, as After the Fires (coll 2008). Her novel, Green Music (2001), Equipoisally combines Afterlife fantasy [see The ...
Hurley, Graham
(1946- ) UK television scriptwriter and producer and author whose first novel, Rules of Engagement (1990; rev 1991), is based on his own 1989 Near Future Television drama, Rules of Engagement (1989 6 episodes), set in the sealed-off English city of Portsmouth just on the eve of World War Three. His later books, mainly the ...
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 ...