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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Magic
In the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928) "magic" is defined as "the pretended art of influencing the course of events ... by processes supposed to owe their efficacy to their power of compelling the intervention of spiritual beings, or of bringing into operation some occult controlling principle of nature". The lexicographer assumed that there is no difficulty in telling a "pretended" art from a real one, nor in distinguishing the "occult" from the ...
Runaway
Film (1984). Tri-Star/Delphi III. Directed by Michael Crichton. Written by Crichton. Cast includes Kirstie Alley, Cynthia Rhodes, Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons. 97 minutes. Colour. / Crichton again exercises his love/hate relationship with Machines in this predictable but exciting thriller about the policeman Sergeant Jack R Ramsay (Selleck), partnered with Karen Thompson (Rhodes) whose job it is to deal with defective ...
Desart, The Earl of
Title of UK author William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe (1845-1898), styled Viscount Castlecuffe until he assumed the earldom at the age of 20 in 1865. He signed all his books "The Earl of Desart"; several of the stories assembled as Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (coll 1887) are sf, at least two of them anticipating with comic apprehension a Near Future in which women are emancipated (his widow became the first woman Senator in the Irish ...
MacGregor, Richard
Pseudonym of UK screenwriter and author Macgregor Urquhart (variously Urquhardt) (1916-1967). As Richard MacGregor he published several routine Genre-SF novels: The Day a Village Died (1963), Taste of the Temptress (1963), Horror in the Night (1963), The Creeping Plague (1963), The Deadly Sun (1964), The Threat (1964) and The First of the Last (1964). [JC/SH]
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 ...