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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 ...
Morse, David
(1940- ) US journalist, poet and author whose sf novel, The Iron Bridge (1998), very effectively utilizes a Time Travel structure: the protagonist, from an America ravaged by Climate Change, Pollution and War, travels to 1773 England where she hopes to find a Jonbar Point in the sabotage the world's first ...
Belden, Wilanne Schneider
(1925- ) US author, mostly of Young Adult titles, whose Mind sequence – comprising Mind-Call (1981), Mind-Hold (1987) and Mind-Find (1988) – places a moderately dysfunctional family with Psi Powers in a Post-Holocaust environment, for they live in California after a vast earthquake has essentially destroyed the ...
Odyssey
1. US letter-size Magazine, two issues, Spring and Summer 1976, published by Gambi Publications, New York; edited by Roger Elwood. Elwood's rapidly deteriorating reputation in the sf field was only further blemished by this weak, unattractive and ill-thought-through magazine. Despite a few headline names (not all accurately spelled) – Frederik Pohl, Jerry ...
Michener, James A
(1907-1997) US author of numerous bestsellers. His long novel Space (1982), televised 1985, is based on the history of the US space programme, becoming sf only in its later stages, when it describes invented missions and adventures roughly contemporaneous with the historical ones (e.g., a disaster owing to an outburst of solar radiation during an Apollo 18 lunar mission in 1973), and then peers optimistically into the Near Future. Among several ...
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 ...