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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 ...
Newman, John [2]
(? - ) US academic and librarian who was credited as Special Collections Librarian at Colorado State University Libraries when he began to publish work of genre interest with a two-part Bibliography of Future War fiction, "America at War: Horror Stories for a Society" in Extrapolation for December 1974 and May 1975. This work led to the ...
Palmer, Frederick
(1873-1958) US journalist widely known as a war correspondent in various conflicts after 1897, and author of numerous nonfiction exercises in military Futures Studies, early emphasizing the likelihood of World War Two. Of sf interest are two Near Future tales: The Last Shot (1914), in which World War One is anticipated in detail; and ...
Letcher, Montgomery E
(? -? ) US author of Wonderful Discovery: Being an Account of a Recent Exploration of the Celebrated Mammoth Cave in Edmonson County, Kentucky, by Dr Rowan, Professor Simmons and Others, of Louisville, to its Termination in an Inhabited Region, in the Interior of the Earth (1839 chap): a Lost World tale told as a hoax – after the example of Edgar Allan Poe and others ...
Dolley, Chris
(1954- ) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Sleeper and the Flame" for the magazine NFG in January 2003 (copyright date given as 2002), and whose promising first novel, Resonance (2005), features an Obsessive-Compulsive protagonist whose Paranoia about the reality of the world – as with several Philip K Dick protagonists – proves ...
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 ...