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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 ...
Dyer, Thoraiya
(? - ) Australian veterinarian, competitive archer, and author of over fifty speculative fiction stories. / Dyer's first published story, "Night Heron's Curse" in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine for November 2008, was a fantasy that drew on Indigenous Australian culture. Subsequent stories moved between sf and fantasy. Her collection Asymmetry (coll ...
Maynard, Richard
(1926- ) UK-born author, resident in Australia, whose The Coconut Book (1985), about a man stranded on an Island, is of some interest. The Quiet Place (1988; vt The Return 1988) rather overcomplicatedly describes the long hegira of a group of astronauts who, due to time dilation (see Relativity), find a Ruined Earth landscape on their ...
de Valda, F W
(1884-1964) UK entrepreneur, pilot and author of two sf novels: Children of the Sun (1934), in which ultra-short waves from a distant star, when projected onto a screen, work as a Time Viewer, giving contemporary humans visual access to Hernando Cortez's savage conquest of Mexico; and The Treasure of Atíl (1934), a Young Adult tale whose young protagonists use various ...
Brown, Jerry Earl
(1940- ) US author in whose first sf novel, Under the City of Angels (1981), a sunken California is delved by the haunted protagonist, who finds powerful corporations and Aliens at the root of things. In Darkhold (1985), a man engages in a Godgame enterprise to Clone five lovers for himself in a kind of ...
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 ...