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 ...
Calvino, Italo
(1923-1985) Italian author, born in Cuba, active from the middle of World War Two, at first with realist works but soon with Gothic, surrealist romances of great vigour and impact, such as Il Visconte dimezzato (1951) and Il Cavaliere inesistente (1959) – translated together by Archibald Colquhoun as The Non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount (omni 1962) – and Il Barone rampante (1957; trans ...
Hard SF
Item of sf Terminology coined by P Schuyler Miller in Astounding (November 1957) and since then widely used by sf Fandom and readers; it has sometimes overlapped in meaning with "hardcore sf", often used in the 1960s and 1970s to mean the kind of sf that repeats the themes and (to a degree) the style of the Genre SF written during the so-called ...
Myhre, Øyvind
(1945- ) Norwegian computer engineer and author. Øyvind Myhre is in some ways an anachronism in Nordic sf (and Fantasy) literature. Where most Danish, Norwegian and Swedish writers working in these fields write either in the modernist or humanist traditions of Clifford D Simak and Ray Bradbury, or J G Ballard ...
Ah Lai
(1959- ) Poet, editor and author, who served from 1999 to 2006 as an editor of Kehuan Shijie ["SF World"], the best-selling genre magazine in the People's Republic of China. Born in the Ngawa and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Ah Lai is that rarest of Chinese authors: a member of China's Tibetan ethnic minority, a condition which shapes much of his work, including the much-garlanded Kong Shan ["Empty ...
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 ...