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 ...
Connington, J J
Pseudonym for all his fiction of Scots author and chemistry professor Alfred Walter Stewart (1880-1947), coiner of the term "isobar" in the sense which (complementing "isotope") describes elements of the same atomic weight but with different atomic numbers. As a writer, he is best known for his 25 detective novels and for his one sf novel, Nordenholt's Million (1923). An early story of world-Disaster being surmounted, it is realistic, reasoned, ...
Space Action
US Comic (1952). Three issues. Ace Magazines (Junior Books, Inc.). Artists include Lou Cameron, Bill Molno, Rocco Mastroserio and Jim McLaughlin. Four comic strips and one (author uncredited) short story per issue. / The comic delivers on its title, the stories being action-dominated Space Operas and are enjoyable as such. The shortness of the strips (7-8 pages) means characters and narratives are formulaic (see ...
Groves, Jay
(1922-2010) US teacher of history and economics, and author whose short sf novel – featuring the landing of a flying saucer (see UFOs) – is Fireball at the Lake: A Story of Encounter with Another World (1967). [JC]
Zap Gun
A usually facetious term for the sf Blaster, Ray Gun or Stunner. Its first recorded appearance in print, according to the online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, was in an October 1934 US newspaper ad for a Buck Rogers spinoff Toy: "Buck Rogers Zap Gun 35¢". Brian W Aldiss's ...
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 ...