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 ...
Furukawa Hideo
(1966- ) Japanese poet, author and playwright, much garlanded with prizes in the literary field, but with roots and interests firmly in the world of Fantastika, with an insistent sense of bricolage, hommage and recursion. In the genre world, he might be most frequently compared to Yasutaka Tsutsui or Yōko Tawada, but teasing his own literary ...
Tex Murphy
Videogame series (from 1989). Access Software (AS). Designed by Aaron Conners, Brent Erickson, Christopher Jones. / Tex Murphy is a series of graphical Adventure games featuring the eponymous twenty-first-century private detective. The setting is a post-World War Three San Francisco, where the skies glow red with radiation and many of the inhabitants are down and out mutants. Tex, the ...
Hall, Rodney
(1935- ) UK-born poet, musician, editor and author, in Australia from 1949, active as a poet from around 1962; Chairperson 1991-1994 of the Australia Council, a body responsible for government arts policy and funding. Several of his novels contain fantasy elements. In Just Relations (1982), for instance, the metaphorical Suspended Animation of the cast approaches the literal. The Yandilli Trilogy, comprising ...
Graphic Novel
To speak of the graphic novel is to speak of a particular kind of Comic book – usually a book-length work in the comics format published in a non-periodical format – but to do so is to risk applying what has become a marketing term to questions of definition, transforming a practical distinction into what looks superficially like a separate genre. In 2004, in response to the widespread misunderstanding of the implications of the term, the artist and ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...