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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 ...
Warwick, Sidney
(1870-1953) UK author of fiction for boys in collaboration with his son Francis Alister Warwick (1902-1975). Sinister Island!: A Vivid Story of Amazing Happenings on an Island in the Pacific (28 July-13 October 1923 Champion: 1924 chap) features a giant inimical native god who incites its savage flock to oppose the white conquerors of a Pacific Island. In Phantom Isle: An Exciting Long Story of Peril and Adventure (1923 Champions; ...
Zumas, Leni
(1972- ) US academic and author whose first book, Farewell Navigator: Stories (coll 2008), contains relatively few outright examples of Fantastika but (see Postmodernism and SF) often admixes an almost suburban mundanity with prescient flashes of the exorbitance of the world. Her first novel The Listeners (2012) slightly less successfully conflates elements of ...
Emerson, Willis George
(1856-1918) US criminal entrepreneur and author, involved in at least one mining fraud and a stock fraud late in life, the latter involving the Emerson Motor Company, whose cars were disguised Fords. Most of his novels were Westerns, whose Lost World novel The Smoky God, or A Voyage to the Inner World (1908; vt as coll, The Smoky God and Other Inner Earth Mysteries 1993) is set in 1829 in a ...
Outer Planets
For a long while, relatively little attention was paid in sf to the planets beyond Jupiter. Of them only Saturn was known to the ancients – Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 – and it is therefore the only outer planet featured in Athanasius Kircher's and Emanuel Swedenborg's interplanetary tours. Uranus, however, is included in the anonymous ...
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 ...