SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Wells, Robert Gilbert
(?1865-? ) US teacher and author, mostly resident in Iowa, where he published Anthropology Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1905), which despite its title is a fictional Satire on race relations in post-Reconstruction America (see Race in SF) with numerous sf and fantastic elements, including Invisibility, Time Travel and a ...
Grey Goo
Popular term (also spelt "gray goo" in the USA) for the nightmare scenario of uncontrolled Nanotechnology in which the hypothetical tiny self-replicators reproduce without limit, converting all available organic matter – or in some cases inorganic matter, or both – into more and yet more devouring grey goo. Such a Disaster is threatened but averted in Assemblers of Infinity (September-December 1992 ...
Weir, Andy
(1972- ) US author who has also written as by Jack Sharp and has self-published fiction at his Galactanet site [see links below] since 2009. His first novel, The Martian (2014), initially self-published as a free online ebook in 2012, describes in considerable detail the travails of an astronaut stranded on Mars as fellow-Scientists work out a way to rescue him. His survival techniques include ...
Omnibuses
While the term "omnibus" has sometimes been used to describe Anthologies, as in the title of Groff Conklin's anthology Omnibus of Science Fiction (anth 1952), it is better reserved for volumes in which complete novels predominate. It is commonplace for veteran authors to republish three or more of their novels in single volumes, especially if they are parts of a trilogy or Series – ...
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 ...