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 ...
Miracle Mile
Film (1988). Hemdale Film, Miracle Mile Productions. Written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt. Cast includes John Agar, Denise Crosby, Anthony Edwards, Lou Hancock, Mykelti Williamson and Mare Winningham. 87 minutes. Colour. / Miracle Mile was shot on location in the 1980s Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles (see California), and covers a period of twenty-four hours in the lives of visitor Harry Warshello (Edwards) and resident Julie Peters ...
Perception
The ways in which we become aware of and receive information about the outside world, mainly through the senses, are together called perception. Philosophers are deeply divided as to whether our perceptions of the outside world correspond to an actual reality, or whether they are merely hypotheses, intellectual constructs, which may give us an unreliable or partial picture of external reality, or whether, indeed, outside reality is itself a mental construct. / Perception is and always has ...
Auel, Jean M
(1936- ) US author who is known solely for her enormously successful Earth's Children sequence of Prehistoric SF novels: The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), The Valley of Horses (1982), both assembled as The Clan of the Cave Bear/The Valley of Horses (omni 1994), plus The Mammoth Hunters (1985), all three assembled as Earth's Children (omni 1987), plus ...
Pielke, Robert G
(1942- ) US author of A New Birth of Freedom: The Visitor (2010), an Alternate History tale designed to begin a series centring on the American Civil War. [JC]
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 ...