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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 ...
Quinn, James L
(1909-1992) US editor whose Quinn Publishing Company started the magazine If in 1952; Quinn became editor after the first four issues. Its circulation gradually declined, and in 1958 Quinn appointed Damon Knight in his place. The magazine's fortunes did not revive and Quinn suspended publication, subsequently selling the title to the publishers of Galaxy Science Fiction. With Eve Wulff he edited two anthologies ...
Gayton, Bertram
Pseudonym of UK author Bertram Edgar Guyton (1893-1969), whose sf novel, The Gland Stealers (1922), deals with physical Rejuvenation achieved by grafting glands from apes into the bodies of elderly humans. Supply shortages lead to a comic ape hunt in Africa. The inevitable Apes as Human issues are handled lightly; and the story ends tragi-farcically as the renewal of youth, though real enough, proves to be ...
Wright, Stephen
(1946- ) US author who remains best known for Meditations in Green (1983), a nonfantastic novel set in Vietnam; he is of direct sf interest for M31: A Family Romance (1988),a Fabulation in an agglutinative style reminiscent of that used by William Gaddis (1922-1998) in The Recognitions (1955). Abandoned by their parents – Dot and Dash, who claim to be Aliens descended ...
Green, Martin
(1927-2010) UK academic and author, in US from 1952. Some of his early studies of the linkages between culture and literature – like "Science and Sensibility" and "Science Fiction" (in Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays About the Two Cultures, coll 1964), and Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918 (1976; rev 1977) – express a remote interest in Genre SF, as filtered through ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...