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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 ...
Lumley, Benjamin
(1811-1875) Canadian-born lawyer, entrepreneurial opera manager and author, who wrote at least once as Hermes; in UK from well before 1832, by which point he had permanently changed his surname from Levy. His career in opera, from 1842 to about 1863, was marked by some scandal (not unusual for the context) and his introduction of nearly thirty operas to Britain, including several by Giuseppe Verdi. His career as a novelist began late, with Sirenia; or, Recollections of a Past Existence ...
Belden, David
(1949- ) Swiss-born UK author, in the USA from 1982 for many years, but later again resident in the UK; his Galactic Collectivity sequence – Children of Arable (1986) and To Warm the Earth (1988) – depicts with clearly felt didactic urgency a Far-Future Earth trapped in sterile stasis, with a stagnant galactic civilization impotently observing the dying of the mother planet, though the ...
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
(1809-1894) US poet, essayist, editor, medical doctor and author, of sf interest in the latter capacity for Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (January 1860-April 1861 The Atlantic Monthly as "The Professor's Story"; 1861 2vols), in which the classic fantasy and supernatural topos of the Lamia is reconstructed in terms of Biology: the eponymous young female, having been "poisoned" in the womb with rattlesnake venom (see ...
Choose Your Own Adventure
Gamebook series (from 1979). Bantam Books, Chooseco. Designed by Edward Packard, R A Montgomery. / Choose Your Own Adventure is a line of "variable plot" or "multiform" books for younger readers; the path taken through the text is determined entirely by choices made by the protagonist, without the Role Playing Game-like rule-based mechanics used in such series as ...
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 ...