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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 ...
Noy, John
(1892-1964) UK author of nautical thrillers, including at least two Children's SF adventures: The Vulture (1927), describing the travails of a young doctor shanghaied into working for pirates in the combined submarine/Airship which is their Invention; and The Pirate Airship (1931), featuring an advanced combination airship/surface ship/submarine. [JC]
Brooks-Dalton, Lily
(1987- ) US author whose first novel, Good Morning, Midnight (2016), depicts a Near Future that may have been brought to silence by a Disaster, though none is specified. The main protagonist, an astronomer entering old age on Earth, seems convinced at points that he is the Last Man left, though he is soon involved in keeping a small girl alive in his abandoned ...
Smith, H Allen
(1907-1976) US newspaperman and author, mostly of humorous sketches (from about 1922) and books, often for the Saturday Evening Post. In his first sf novel, Mr Klein's Kampf, or His Life as Hitler's Double (1939), a Jew takes over from his look-alike, Hitler, and spoofishly declares Germany to be the new Zion. The Age of the Tail (1955), also a comic Satire, depicts the effect on a ...
Kalu, Peter
(1963- ) UK translator, rock musician, playwright and author who began his active career with the Moss Side Write workshop for Black writers; the Ambrose Patterson series of Near Future police thrillers – comprising Lick Shot (1993), Professor X (1995) and Yard Dogs (2001) – is set in a noir Manchester. In Lick Shot, racism is being fomented by a white supremacist ...
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 ...