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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 ...
Schenck, Hilbert
(1926-2013) US engineer, university lecturer and author who published his first sf story, "Tomorrow's Weather" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1953, long before he became seriously (though briefly) involved in fiction; much of his nonfiction of the 1950s and 1960s dealt lovingly with the ocean and with oceanological research and exploration technologies. His first two novels are both set in the ocean-girt Cape Cod region of New England, ...
Foreman, Russell
(1921-2000) Australian author of a Near Future Disaster novel, The Ringway Virus (1976), in which a virus-based Pandemic 100% fatal to humans threatens to terminate the species; there is some small chance that isolated breeding couples will survive. [JC]
Artzybasheff, Boris
(1899-1965) Ukraine-born US illustrator who fled to the US after the Russian Revolution. Although much of his prodigious output – he painted over 200 covers for Time magazine – had a fantasticated feel to it, only a small portion is directly relevant to the fantastic genres. Most notable among these are his cover for the 1926 US reissue of E R Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and his set of interior ...
Walker, Paul
(1942-2007) US critic and author in whose sf novel, Who Killed Utopia (1980), the first murder to have taken place for a century brings suspicion upon the poet/Computer at the heart of things. Walker contributed book reviews to Galaxy in 1978, and in the same year published a collection of thirty-one sometimes very informative postal Interviews, ...
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 ...