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 ...
Adams, Tom
(1926-2019) US-born illustrator, printmaker and designer, in UK from early childhood; along with Richard Chopping (1917-2008), he was deeply influential in the 1960s and 1970s for creating in commercial terms an indelibly memorable marriage of surrealism and trompe l'oeil techniques (including collage), an influence mostly visible in his long succession of covers for the novels of Agatha Christie, mostly in reprint form. His influence on sf ...
Newton, Julius P
(? - ) UK author whose The Forgotten Race (1963; vt The Forgotten Planet 1973) depicts with awkward sincerity the attempts of the inhabitants of Venus and Mars – both survivors of the atomic Holocaust which destroyed the fifth planet – who attempt to dissuade visiting Earthmen from starting ...
Takahashi Rumiko
(1957- ) Japanese comics creator, notable through being a female author largely for magazines with predominantly male readerships, whose best-selling status by the late 1980s helped to propel her to foreign attention. She remains one of the Manga industry's most prominent celebrities, regularly appearing in annual lists of Japan's highest tax-payers, and hence one of the most successful ...
Moores, George
(? -? ) UK author of The British Empire in 1950: A Peep into the Future (1931 chap), a lightly fictionalized Future History in which it is assumed (World War Two not here being predicted) that the British Empire survives. [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 ...