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
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Stewart, Michael
UK author and economist (1933- ). With Peter Jay (whom see for details) he wrote Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy, 1898-2000 (1987). [JC]
Binns, Ottwell
(1872-1935) UK Congregational and then Unitarian minister and author, much better known as Ben Bolt, the pseudonym he used from around 1890, for his detective fiction and vigorous adventure tales, though his first novel in book form appeared as late as 1917; he also wrote as by Benjamin Bolt. Dan-Yeo; Or, the Island of the Lost (1929) as Ottwell Binns is a Lost Race tale set on an unknown Island in the South Pacific, ...
Koester, Frank
(1876-1927) German-born engineer and author whose birth name was Franz Koester; in the US from 1902 and naturalized in 1904. His Under the Desert Stars (1923) is a Lost Race tale set in the Sahara Desert. [JC]
France
The history of France's relationship with sf is one of long flirtation, marked through the centuries by episodic outbursts of passion and, in recent times, by an increasing shift from authorship to readership, from the active to the passive role, as more and more people become avid consumers of the US/UK sf tradition. A few remarkable French writers of sf have emerged, but, although the 1970s were an active period for French sf, no truly indigenous school of writing has yet taken shape. / A ...
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 ...