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 ...
Wilson, Granville
(1912-2001) UK journalist and author, who should not be confused with the non-writer Leslie Granville Eyre Wilson (1912-2008). He is the author of three sf novels: Murder Goes Underground (1949), featuring a Death Ray, housed in an atomic car, which destroys other cars; plus two Young Adult tales, War of the Computers (1981), about troubles in Dystopia, and ...
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
(1893-1930) Russian poet and playwright, a revolutionary from early years, a Futurist poet whose verse radically shocked post-Revolution Russia. Of particular sf interest is his first fully fledged prose Satirical play, Klop (performed 1929; 1929; trans Guy Daniels as The Bedbug in The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, coll 1968), in which, some generations hence, a Soviet bureaucrat who has been in ...
Duke, Madelaine
Pseudonym of Ukrainian-born physician and author Elizabeth Magda MacFarlane (1919-1996), in UK from 1939 or earlier; active under her main pseudonym plus at least two others in a variety of genres including sf novels (which she describes as "cartoons"). Claret, Sandwiches and Sin: A Cartoon (1964 as by Maxim Donne; 1966 as by Duke) depicts a world insecurely amalgamated, after a World War Three that has, in ...
Interviews
Much information about the History of SF has been recorded in author, artist, editor and film-maker interviews, which have been a feature of Fanzines since the earliest days and have later appeared in SF Magazines, Semiprozines and especially Media Magazines. Interviewers of note who have published multiple collections of ...
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 ...