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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 ...
Shand, Daniel
(1989- ) Scottish teacher and author in whose first novel, Fallow (2016), two brothers embark on a hegira through Scotland, with a picaresque shaping to the tale that evokes the supernatural. He is of sf interest for his third novel, Model Citizens (2022), set in a Near Future world where the growing stresses facing Homo sapiens are, perhaps, solved by the issuing/creating of ...
McQuay, Mike
Working name of US author Michael Dennis McQuay (1949-1995), who began to publish sf with his first novel, Life-Keeper (1980), which very competently presents the kind of scenario he unrelentingly promulgated in book after book: a noir world governed by corrupt forces; a tough, anarchic, street-wise male protagonist whose powers – and virtue – are very exceptional indeed; and a plot which gives plenty of opportunities for arena-like conflicts between that ...
Oliver, Lauren
Pseudonym of US author Laura Schechter (1982- ). whose first novel, Before I Fall (2010), is fantasy; of sf interest is the Delirium sequence of Young Adult tales, comprising Delirium (2011) and Pandemonium (2012) and set in a Dystopian Near Future America, where a medical cure for love is imposed on all citizens at the age of ...
Cyborgs
The term "cyborg" is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to the product of human/machine hybridization. It was coined by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline in their article "Cyborgs in Space" (September 1960 Astronautics p26), which proposed "Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments". Early sf uses of the term appear in the Comic Space Man (1962) and Frank ...
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 ...