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 ...
De Las Cuevas, Ramon
Pseudonym of US anthropologist, archaeologist, museum curator and author Mark Raymond Harrington (1882-1971) whose only known work of fiction, the novella "Teoquitla the Golden" (November 1924 Weird Tales), is a Lost Race tale embedding within some typical Clichés of the form an early, interesting and nonjudgmental Transgender SF plot. The protagonist finds a ...
Japan
For a general note on this encyclopedia's handling of Japanese names, please see Editorial Practices: Chinese and Japanese Names. / Japan persists as a symbol of the alien and the unknowable, and popularly as a signifier of the future, particularly in the "Japanesque" vocabularies and settings of Cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and Bruce ...
Lane, Jane
Pseudonym of UK author Elaine Kidner Dakers (1905-1978), author under her own name of a biography, Titus Oates (1949), and author of many esteemed historical novels under as by Lane. Her Post-Holocaust sf novel, A State of Mind (1964), is set in an Orwell-like totalitarian Dystopia, an England where both god and monarchy have been banned. [JC]
Martyn, Wyndham
Pseudonym of UK author William Henry Martin Hosken (1874-1963), in the US from 20 July 1904, having travelled as Wyndham Martyn, just before he began publishing fiction in American magazines, sometimes also as W H G Wyndham Martin, Croydon Heath, or William Grenvil. He seems to have written (and may have lived as) Wyndham Martyn from an early date; and although the record of his death gives Grenvil W Martyn, there is no evidence he ever legally changed his birth name. He was the first cousin 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 ...