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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 ...
Austruy, Henri
(1871-circa 1940) French editor and author whose left-wing politics may have caused his death at the hands of the Nazis. He was not a prolific author, his time mostly taken by his editorship of La Nouvelle Revue from 1913 to 1940, when it was shut down by the occupying forces. Much of that output is sf, including L'Eupantophone (September-December 1904 La Nouvelle Revue; 1905; trans Brian Stableford with added stories as ...
End of the World
Together with Utopias and cautionary tales, apocalyptic visions form one of the three principal traditions of pre-twentieth-century futuristic fantasy. Visions inspired by the religious imagination go back into antiquity (see Mythology; Religion), and the artist John Martin depicted vast biblical catastrophes with particular relish from the 1820s to the 1850s; but the ...
Psychology
The science of the mind is sufficiently different from the physical sciences for its discoveries and hypotheses to set very different problems and offer very different opportunities to the writer of speculative fiction. Psychology still carries a considerable burden of pseudoscientific conjecture even if one sets aside its close and problematic relationship with parapsychology (see ESP; Psi Powers); a case in point may be ...
Patrick, Cat
(? - ) US author whose novels use sf topoi, some of them Clichés, to activate romance plots for Young Adult readers: in Forgotten (2011) it is a daily Memory Edit which imposes an effect state of Amnesia on its young protagonist; in Revived (2012) an experimental Drug ...
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 ...