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 ...
Horner, Donald W
(1874-1944) UK astronomer, meteorologist and author who specialized in popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910) offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech Near Future, featuring picturephones, television and electric cars, and describing the protagonists' usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism, though the inhabitants of ...
Soto, Adam
(? - ) US musician, editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Animal Fires" in Fairy Tale Review: The Transcendent Issue (anth 2017) edited by Benjamin Schaefer. His first novel, This Weightless World (2021), is set initially in 2012 Chicago, just after SETI research has broken the news that a Communication has been received from an ...
Beyond Fantasy & Science Fiction
UK Semiprozine published and edited by David A Riley, Parallel Universe Publications, Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. It was printed in A4 format on glossy paper but its overall appearance would fall short of being called Slick, although production values did improve over the three issues, which were dated April/May 1995, June/July 1995 and September/October 1995. It resembled, in its contents and artwork, ...
God Game
Term used to describe a form of Videogame in which the player has the powers of an actual or metaphorical god, as well as some of the limitations attributed to such entities by deist religions. A God Game will typically contain a simulation of a world, a nation or (more prosaically) a business, inhabited by mortals (or employees) conducting their own independent lives. The player is given specific powers – for example, the ability to cause divine earthquakes ...
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 ...