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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 ...
Jeury, Michel
(1934-2015) French author whose apprentice sf in the 1960s was written as by Albert Higon (a pseudonym he used occasionally in later decades as well); his first novel under his own name, Le temps incertain (1973; trans Maxim Jakubowski as Chronolysis 1980), very clearly evokes the world and methods of Philip K Dick in a Changewar plot that pits agents from a fascist ...
Maguire, John Francis
(1815-1872) Irish nationalist politician and journalist, founder of the Cork Examiner. In his sf novel The Next Generation (1871 3vols), set in 1891, the UK has been much improved by steam-powered Balloons and the granting of women's suffrage (see Feminism); romance and the explication of other meliorist reforms just this side of Utopia take up the remainder of a very long book. "Jack ...
Gregory, Jackson
(1882-1943) US author of Westerns, two of which have some sf interest: Daughter of the Sun (1921) as by Quién Sabe is a Lost Race tale set close enough to Mexico for one of Montezuma's secret heirs to cause an erotic ruckus; Ru the Conqueror (1933) is Prehistoric SF, also mildly erotized. [JC]
Toffler, Alvin
(1928-2016) US journalist and author, best known for his speculative nonfiction on Sociology and Futures Studies, at that time better known as Futurology. Future Shock (1970) documents the increasing rate of change in the twentieth century, and speculates on the psychological trauma this may be causing Western civilization. Filmed as Future Shock (1972) with narration ...
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 ...