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 ...
Allen, Johannes
(1916-1973) Danish journalist and author of popular fiction and film scripts from about 1941. Among his few sf titles the best known is Data for din død (1970; trans Marianne Helweg as Data for Death 1971), which tells of a criminal organization whose acquisition of advanced Computer techniques permits it to blackmail people with information about their time of death. [ND]
Garn, Jake
Working name of US politician and author Edwin Jacob Garn (1932- ), a Republican, US Senator for Utah 1974-1993. During his tenure, he flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985, the first sitting member of the US Congress to engage personally in Space Flight. His sf novel, Night Launch (1989) with Stephen Paul Cohen of the Brookings Institute, posits a Near Future neo-Nazi terrorist ...
Evans, Linda
(1958- ) US author whose first novel Sleipnir (1994) is a fantasy in which a modern GI intervenes in the world of Norse Gods and Mythology as Ragnarok looms. With Robert Asprin, Evans co-wrote the Time Scout sequence of Time Travel adventures beginning with Time Scout (1995), in which accidentally ...
Pinchin, Frank J
(1925-1990) UK research chemist and author. His first four sf novels, all as by Peter Dagmar, were not exceptional: Alien Skies (1962), Spykos 4: Strange Life-Forms on Unexplored Planets (1962; vt Spaceways 1973), Sands of Time (1963) – a fairly complex Time-Travel tale in which visitors from the future attempt to destroy a post-World War Three super- ...
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 ...