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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Orb Speculative Fiction
Australian low-paying Semiprozine published by Orb Publications, South Preston, Victoria and edited by Sarah Endacott; eight issues to date, Spring/Summer 1999 to #8, 2010; began with issue #0 but had a combined issue #3/#4, 2002. Issue #8 is a huge (420 page) "best of" retrospective of the previous seven issues. Orb is amongst the elite of Australian magazines, originally published annually, but with only two issues since 2004, it is published in a ...
House Names
Floating Pseudonyms invented by a publishing company and regularly made available to or imposed upon its authors. They were usually created to protect a literary or intellectual property owned by the publisher and to which various writers contributed. One of the earliest was "Noname" employed by the publisher Frank Tousey on the Frank Reade and Frank Reade, Jr series of dime novels. The use of house names became ...
Invisible Avenger
Film (1958; vt The Invisible Avenger; vt Bourbon Street Shadows; vt Terror in the Night). Republic Pictures. Produced by Emanuel Demby and Eric Sayers. Directed by James Wong Howe, Ben Parker and John Sledge. Written by George Bellak and Ruth Jeffries from a story by Walter B Gibson (uncredited). Cast includes Mark Daniels, Steve Dano, Richard Derr, Dan Mullin and Helena Westcott. 60 minutes. Black and white. / Expatriate ...
McKinney, Jack
Collaborative pseudonym of Brian C Daley and James Luceno for a series of Ties to the Robotech Television series of Mecha cartoon adventures; also for the unrelated Black Hole Travel Agency sequence, about the threatened use of Earth as an amusement park for Aliens. [JC/DRL]
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 ...