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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 ...
Lindsay, John V
(1921-2000) US lawyer, politician (mayor of New York 1965-1973), and author of an sf novel, The Edge (1976), set in a Near Future America threatening to become a police state on grounds of the increased need for security (see Prediction). [JC]
Hicks, Clifford B
(1920-2010) US author of novels, almost exclusively for children, including the Alvin Fernald series for younger readers; of sf interest is First Boy on the Moon (1959), whose two protagonists (with their frog) go to the Moon, inspiringly. [JC]
Small Presses and Limited Editions
Any firm founded to release work of personal interest to the publisher, and which distributes that work to readers whose interest can also be assumed, may be called a small press. Four years before Hugo Gernsback began Amazing Stories in 1926, The Lunar Publishing Company of Providence, Kentucky, was founded by friends of the author of the book it had been created in order to publish – and then folded. ...
Futrelle, Jacques
(1875-1912) US author and theatrical manager, on the editorial staff of the Boston American; he was one of four authors of sf (the others are John Jacob Astor, F D Millet and W T Stead) known to have gone down with the Titanic. The stories assembled in his Thinking Machine collections about the scientific detective Professor Augustus S F X Van Dusen ...
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 ...