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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 ...
Heath, Peter
Working name of US author Peter Heath Fine (1938-1995), whose novels Assassins from Tomorrow (1967) – which suggests that John F Kennedy (see Icons) was assassinated by killers from the future – The Mind Brothers (1967) and Men Who Die Twice (1968) comprise the thriller-like Mind Brothers sf series, which combines a great deal of fairly convoluted action with Time Travel. The ...
Scarborough, Dorothy
(1878-1935) Working name of Emily Dorothy Scarborough, US author best known for her novels about the contemporary American southwest, most notably The Wind (1925), a hauntingly surreal portrait of a woman maddened by listening to the Texas winds. While she edited two volumes of ghost stories (see Eschatology; Supernatural Creatures), Famous Modern Ghost Stories (1921) and ...
Barrowcliffe, Mark
(1964- ) UK author who also writes as by Mark Alder and as by M D Lachlan. His early novels, beginning with Girlfriend 44 (2000) and all under his own name, are nonfantastic, though The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing up Strange (2007) is an amusing memoir, focusing on his adolescent obsession with the Role Playing Game Dungeons & Dragons. / Most of Barrowcliffe's pseudonymous ...
Kennemore, Tim
(1957- ) UK author of children's and Young Adult fiction; she was given the name "Tim" by schoolmates. Her first sf book, The Fortunate Few (1981) is typical of her sharp interest in the power structures adolescents must come to terms with, as here dramatized by its depiction of a Near Future world where gymnastics have become big business, and young athletes risk becoming depersonalized ciphers ...
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 ...