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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 ...
Xenogears
Videogame (1998). Square. Designed by Tetsuya Takahashi. Platforms: PS1. / Xenogears is a Console Role Playing Game (see Computer Role Playing Games) which is played in a three-dimensional perspective. It is more adult in tone than earlier Japanese CRPGs such as Chrono Trigger (1995), with a player character ...
Gill, Richard
(1948- ) UK author known only for a short collection of varied stories which meditate fairly tamely on the nature of Time, Time Keepers (coll 1989 chap), none of which had been published before this assembly. [JC]
Grok
Item of sf Terminology coined in Robert A Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; text restored 1991), which was rapidly adopted in Fan Language and by late-1960s counterculture writers, and became sufficiently widespread to be regarded as having entered the English language – as recorded in The Oxford English Dictionary (1989). In Heinlein's novel ...
Wonder, William
Pseudonym of US author Thomas Kirwan (1829-1911), whose Utopia, Reciprocity (Social and Economic) in the Thirtieth Century; The Coming Cooperative Age: A Forecast of the World's Future (1909), casts its twentieth-century protagonist, via an unexplained form of Time Travel, a millennium hence, where New York presides benignly over a mostly rural land, with good-humoured socialist precepts ...
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 ...